Nice and easy…

As discussed in the previous post on the Leica CityMapper Sensor I’m doing more posts on related tech news stories and products. I’ve not been paid or given special access to Enscape software and neither have I asked for it. This is one of many useful tools that some of you in urban planning, architecture or geodesign might find useful.

I’m a sucker for an easy workflow to nice looking 3D visualisations and renderings. So when I saw a demo of Enscape I had to have a go… early impressions of this are great.

Using it pre-existing older SketchUp projects I found it easy to produce nice look static imagery as well as spherical photos and jump into a nicely implemented VR experience. Not only that but I can export to exe file for others to use (providing they have a 3D graphics card it seems) and a WebGL environment in a webbrowser.

Easy to export and respects and works nicely with SketchUp materials

I’m still in the early stages of exploring this but it would certainly fulfil a niche for those wanting quick beautiful looking renders done ‘in-house’ especially if like me you’re part of a small team who doesn’t have access to a 3D visualisation team all the time.

The SketchUp integration works really well and it respects your materials (if using the defaults from SketchUp) there’s a range of additional assets that are simple placeholders in SketchUp but nice trees/cars/people/accessories when viewed in the Enscape viewer.

Assets that come with Enscape are simple white models in SketchUp but detailed in the viewer

My favourite part is being able to synchronise the SketchUp view with the Enscape view so as you navigate and add more detail in SketchUp that is immediately reflected in Enscape’s viewer. Now, don’t get me wrong there are other software products that do the same and probably better visuals, but for shear ease of use, you’d be silly not to have a try.

That’s not all Enscape is not just for SketchUp, but also integrate with Autodesk Revit, Rhincesos, and ArchiCAD. I hope to try Revit integration shortly too.. Now, I’ll come back to Enscape in another blog post I think. I’m tempted to maybe even link in some of the spherical/360 imagery and interactive WebGL environments as well….