Enscape 3.1 Review: Taming the Material Editor for Revit

The new Enscape 3.1 has just been released! The amazing 3.0 version had a complete overhaul of the user interface that made this great software even better. What’s new in 3.1? Let’s have a look at the biggest new features.

Note: this post is not sponsored or endorsed by the Enscape team.

New: Enscape Material Library

The Enscape material library works by allowing you to import materials from Enscape to your local Revit file. All Enscape materials have to be imported into Revit before you can use them. Click on the Import Selection button to bring them to your project.

As you can see, the selected material now becomes a Revit material. While these materials are great for renderings, they miss certain Revit information that is typically used in a project. For example, the Enscape brick material doesn’t have any surface patterns, which means it will look odd when using Hidden Lines or Colored view styles.

These are complete Revit materials, not just appearance assets. That means that when you replace an existing material with an Enscape material, some BIM data might get lost in the process.

After discussing this issue with the Enscape team, they’ve proposed to use the Import/Export Material Package tool (more on that later).

An alternate workflow for this tool would be to have an appearance assets library instead of actual materials, which would prevent data loss problems.

Another alternative would be to have Enscape material as independent assets, which you could apply on top of Revit materials. Lumion is successfully using this workflow to map materials between Revit and the Lumion library. This way, you keep your BIM data while still being able to customize the appearance for renderings.

Still, this library contains beautiful materials that are ready for your renderings. Check out these pretty woods, tiles and bricks.

Enscape Material Editor

SketchUp users already had access to a material editor, but not Revit users. However, there is a limitation: only materials with a Generic type Revit appearance will appear in the Enscape Material Editor. In the example below, you can see the material called RP-XT-Grey Brick doesn’t appear in the Enscape Editor because it is classified as Masonry.

To be fair, the Generic appearance asset type contains more options for high-quality renderings. An expert workflow would actually be to use Generic for all your materials.

Above, you can see the settings in the Enscape. They show almost the same data as in the Revit editor, although Enscape has a much better UI. If you modify a parameter here, the actual Revit material will also be affected.

Some values are different. For example, Enscape has Roughness instead of Glossiness, which are the opposite of one another. Modifying the “Specular” reflection doesn’t seem to affect Direct and Oblique reflection in the Revit material.

Although only Revit Generic appearance assets are allowed, you can switch the type of materials once inside the Enscape editor. For example, you can use the Grass type and customize the height and variation:

There are a couple of great subtle features in here. In native Revit, modifying each image map in material is slow and painful.

In Enscape, all maps can be easily accessed. Adjusting scales and angles can be done much more quickly. You can see an example below for a brick material. Also, you will get immediate feedback in Enscape instead of having to close down the whole Revit material editor each time.

If you imported materials from the Enscape Material Library and you only want to use the appearance, select the Enscape material, click on the … symbol and select “Export Material Package”.

Then, select your existing brick material and select “Import Material Package”.

Only the appearance asset will be imported, not the whole material information.

Overall, the new Enscape material editor is amazing because of how terrible Revit’s material editor is. Wouldn’t it be amazing if Revit was entirely available with such a neat and polished user interface?

Simplified Assets

All assets in Enscape 3.0 were ultra-realistic, which is great in almost all situations. But what if you want an abstract rendering with conceptual assets? That’s now possible with the Simplified Assets. These components are white and have a low polygon count. In the image below, you can see the new simple assets have an orange “New” symbol next to them.

You will find conceptual assets like this in the People, Buildings, Vegetation, Furniture and Vehicles categories. Check out the conceptual rendering:

If you like to create presentation documents using Revit, check out these posts:

COMPARING 6 REVIT RENDERING PLUGINS

9 TIPS TO CREATE BEAUTIFUL 3D VIEWS IN REVIT

HOW TO MAKE GREAT REVIT ELEVATIONS

Ray-Traced Sun Shadows (For Images)

If you have an Nvidia RTX graphic card, you can activate the Ray-Traced Sun Shadows option in the Rendering settings menu.

You’ll also have access to the Denoiser and DLSS option (see next feature).

Here, you can see the effect when Ray-Traced Shadows are activated:

1.5X Better Performance (With Nvidia DLSS)

Nvidia created a technology called DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) that allows the graphic card to use deep learning to upscale lower-resolution images to a higher-resolution. This technology allows a 1.5x better performance in Full HD and a 2.0x better performance in 4k.

This feature is compatible with all NVIDIA RTX graphic cards.

Click here to learn about the DLSS technology and here to learn more about its integration with Enscape.

Panorama Gallery

It was already possible to create panoramas in Enscape and share them with a web browser. Now, you can create a panorama gallery, in which you can group share multiple panoramas at the same time.

That’s it for the new features! The Enscape team has been killing it. It still is the best software to create fantastic renderings from Revit models.