Product Review: Enscape for Mac SketchUp

Continued from page 2

Rendering

Enscape is an “interactive renderer.” As you move around—whether by controls in SketchUp or controls in Enscape—the Enscape viewport renders the scene in real-time. 

Once you stop moving, the visual quality of the rendered viewport optimizes. The Rendering Quality slider establishes the final image quality in the Visual Settings. The user can also set the rendering Style mode in the Visual Settings as well, including White model, Polystyrol, and Light View. (see images 15 – 17)

Image 15 — Enscape visual quality settings.

Image 16 — Atmospheric settings include fog, numerous lighting setting options, and wind.

Image 17 — Image settings give the user some post-render settings controls.

Users may want to control the camera projection and force it into Two-Point perspective mode while working. You do this in the Visual Settings too. To add backgrounds to the scene, go to the Sky tab in the Visual Settings. Options include Mountains (which I used), Desert, Forest, Urban, and several others. I would like to see more options for backgrounds (doubling would be quite nice), and there is nothing for a beachfront project site or a harbor location site, for example.

However, you can load a custom HDR image under the Sky tab in Visual Settings to place your rendering exactly into its physical context if you have such an image already made. That task and file type is a more advanced topic more applicable to specialists than the typical architect Enscape is targeting. This is why I think the preset options for backgrounds should be increased to cover more possible terrain conditions. 

Enscape has some sophisticated clouds and sky technology. And you can edit illumination settings for the sun, night sky, artificial light, ambient brightness, and shadow sharpness. Enscape also supports Corrections controls like color temperature, saturation, and contrasts. Then there are Effects, including motion blur, lens flare, bloom vignette, and chromatic aberration. 

Image 18 — An example of a final render with Enscape for Mac SketchUp with post-render color temperature adjustments. The sky, trees, and lighting through the vegetation look extremely photographic, and I was very pleased with what I was able to produce so quickly. Click on the image to see a larger view. 

Enscape facilitates high-quality renders of the current viewport. You can do both screenshots of single images or batch rendering. The time it takes to render a scene depends on the image Resolution and quality settings in the Visual Settings dialog and your hardware. 

Enscape also supports 360-degree pano rendering. These are pretty nice, and though they take more time, they are worth a lot. Enscape can also render animations. And Enscape creates desktop and web standalone files to be shared with project stakeholders. On the Mac, you only have the choice of a web standalone. The desktop one is a (.exe) file for Windows computers. (see image 19)

Image 19 — Enscape can create standalone renderings pushed to the cloud where clients, for example, can investigate 360-degree panos or just visual stills like this one.

A nice thing to do for your clients is to share a web standalone of a series of pano renders. This gives them the ability to explore a design. The rendering quality in the web browser-based view in the web standalone is different than Enscape itself. Plants and trees and the lighting look great, but procedural textures like grass and water are not truly supported, so these items get flatter. (see image 19). The grass is “blade-less” and just a green color. However, Enscape’s cloud and skies look quite good in the standalone render apps. 

Closing Comments

When we were asked to review Enscape, the German software company asked us to focus on the Mac version and specifically test it on Apple Silicon. So we did. All of the work you see in this review was executed on an M1-chip-based Mac mini with 16GB of integrated memory on the Apple-designed ARM architecture SOC (system on a chip). 

We also ran our review under macOS Big Sur (11.6.5), though Enscape says it is not officially supported. We encountered no real issues, and the performance of rendering our little SketchUp Mies-ian pool pavilion—created quickly just for this review—was very acceptable. Things were quite snappy! We can only imagine how fast Enscape would run on the latest M2-based Macs or the upcoming Mac Pro with Apple Silicon. In general, this model and the scenes created were hardly vast. So we can’t truly speak to the performance of Enscape on the Mac with larger models and scenes. That will be a follow-up report we will get to in the months ahead. What we can say for certain is that Enscape for Mac SketchUp ran smoothly and quickly on our Apple Silicon Mac Mini. 

Image 20 — Enscape’s depth of field of view feature is shown in this image. The lounging chairs are in sharp focus, and the elements beyond are blurred out. The glass plane on the pavilion reflects everything to its right, so bear that in mind when viewing this image. Mies’ chairs are on the inside on the left.

There are a few minor points of criticism with Enscape for Mac. Architects doing a wide variety of work will surely bring in their own models for furniture, especially manufacturer models. What architects need are things to accessorize their scenes, and they need high-quality items. This isn’t about the quality of the objects as 3D objects but rather the design and brand-name quality of the objects.

I was very pleased with the vegetation objects in the Library. Still, I thought there needed to be more coniferous, particularly full-bodied conifers that are taller than a couple of Christmas tree options. It would also be nice to see more autumn variety in terms of color. If you wanted to create a New England scene in the fall, it might be a bit more challenging than you would like, given what is in the library today. I am sure these small issues will all be improved in the near future. 

For design study models, it would be nice if Enscape added a balsa wood rendering option to complement the white model option. I know that users individually do this, so it would be a big time saver not to have to apply such a texture itself but have it automated like the white-model function. 

Overall, I laud this software for its efficiency in giving architects—as opposed to specialist rendering pros—a wonderfully simple and effective visualization tool. The side-by-side view approach within design applications—because it is a plugin—means that visualization becomes a part of the design process and gives the architect a level of confirmation that they usually must wait for further downstream in the design phase. It means architects can get more connected to the reality of their design decisions earlier in the design process while they are still modeling space and form. From this perspective, Enscape for Mac SketchUp is an outstanding software that architects should consider adding to their arsenal of tools. Now we just look forward to continued improvements and more Mac versions for leading BIM solutions and Rhino if those are in the works. 

Pros: Enscape for Mac SketchUp was pleasing and fun to use. We only watched a few Enscape-created videos to get started, though there is a good Knowledge Base here specifically for this version on the Mac. Enscape has an appealing visual quality with a good set of customizations; it can rapidly create white models and light view models. It has good navigation controls, excellent Help guides, a standalone render option, and a solid objects library that will surely get better over time. As a plugin for SketchUp on the Mac, Enscape offers a level of visual intention feedback that is hard to beat, offering designers and architects higher certainty of design intent, and it delivers this for a very fair price. 

Cons:  Feature parity with its Windows version will take more time and will take Apple to support certain things like VR more. The web standalone solution drops out the visual qualities of water and grass, but the skies remain excellent. When Synchronize Views is toggled “on,” and you are working in the Enscape window trying to tune up a view for rendering, you may get stuck having to go back and break synchronization so you can set your view to a two-point perspective. While we understand why it happens, that doesn’t change the workflow fix. A method to reach those Enscape buttons when you are inside the Enscape window may be a solution, or perhaps not? 

Recommendations:  Enscape on Mac for Sketchup is stable and fast, including on Apple Silicon Macs. For SketchUp users who have not yet tried this rendering plugin, we highly recommend it given the software’s visual qualities, flexible output options, and overall pleasant user experience (UX) a big thumbs up! 

Costs: 514 USD MSRP for a fixed seat license per year (subscription)