Thursday, March 30, 2017

Enscape Grass; Too Cool

I tend to use and promote native Revit workflows and the biggest-bang-for-your-buck tools. Rendering in Revit and the Autodesk Cloud has its place, and I still use them often. I wrote about Revit 2016's new render engine via an AECbytes article; Revit 2016's New Physical-Realistic Rendering Engine.

However, all of the tools I typically use have left a lot to be desired when it comes to grass.

Enscape just released a new update that has some amazing grass as shown in the image below; thick and modeled rather than flat and repetitive. I first discovered this new feature while presenting earlier this week, read about that here, on Revit rendering, Revit materials and Enscape. What a pleasant surprise!

  • Update: This feature is currently only available in the Enscape Preview release, which can be downloaded here: https://enscape3d.com/preview/. Like most beta software, it is not recommend to be used in production (just for testing).



Any material with the word "grass" gets this special treatment... off the cuff, I told the interior design students they may be able to leverage this for shag carpet:)

The only tricky thing I have seen with the grass is if there is a small gap between the building and a toposurface sub-region there will be some grass poking up there. This makes it look like someone needs to get our there with a weed wacker!

I believe the only way to turn this new grass feature off would be to rename your material to not have the word "grass" in it. I also do not see a way to control the height of the grass - this is one healthy looking lawn. One thing you can change is the Appearance Asset's Tint setting (via Revit Materials dialog) to adjust the color if you wish. Let's say you want a darker green, shag carpet or you are creating a model for Smurfsville and shown in the image below.



While on the subject of Enscape, the image above has a Skybox (HRD) file loaded. This encloses your project in an environment with a flat bottom (ground) and a dome shaped lid. The image below shows a different Skybox file selected.


The Skybox file is selected from Revit, in the Enscape Settings dialog as shown below.




Here is a link to Enscape's help page on the Skybox feature which also lists some good places to get HRD files. https://enscape3d.com/knowledgebase/skybox-as-a-background/

Enjoy!