We continue our coverage of what we saw at the 2024 AIA National Convention in Washington, DC. This report focuses entirely on Chaos Enscape. In Part 5, we will cover Snaptrude, SketchPro.AI, Dell, and a few other tech companies at AIA. You can read the earlier reports here:
Chaos Enscape
When it comes to visualization in the AEC/O industry, Chaos (formerly known as the Chaos Group) has emerged as the industry leader. That leadership began when its flagship V-Ray rendering software—which today functions in hybrid modes (biased and unbiased)—largely took over high-end architectural visualization and began to dethrone Autodesk’s 3ds Max. Meanwhile, when the new breed of real-time interactive renderers emerged in the market, Germany’s Enscape gained significant interest from both architects and archviz professionals. With the merger of Enscape and Bulgaria’s Chaos Group, the resultant combined company known as “Chaos” ended up being one of the largest software companies in the world focused on the AEC/O market. It has since acquired other companies and grown further and now has over 700 employees.
Today, Chaos‘ product line includes V-Ray, Corona, and Enscape as their main rendering core technology stacks. It also includes Vantage and Anima ALL and its cloud rendering solution. All of these target the AEC market. For the M&E market, Chaos Phoenix is an all-in-one fluid-dynamics simulation system for Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max, plus its own V-Ray and Corona. Lastly, Cylindo is a 3D product visualization for commerce. Cutting across multiple major industries, Chaos at heart is a “visualization” software company, but importantly, what we mean by “visualization” is rather wide open.
AEC Focus
AEC is the company’s largest market, which shows how much the product line has expanded. The Chaos Enscape combination addresses the full spectrum of archviz needs, whether implemented by regular design architects or dedicated archviz professionals working in visualization agencies and studios.
Chaos’ product line has expanded over the years since its key merger with Enscape. For the AEC/O market, Chaos offers a full spectrum of solutions for both architects and designers and dedicated 3D artists. (Image from AIA24)
For this AIA24 report, we want to expand on what Chaos spoke to us about in terms of their visions for the industry. This breaks into three themes: (1) democratizing building performance, (2) Bridge: Connected Workflows, and (3) AI technologies.
1 – Democratizing Building Performance
At AIA24 in DC, we had a chance to speak with Dan Monaghan and Roger Bates of Chaos. Bates is the Director of Corporate Development, while Monaghan is the Regional Head of AEC Sales, Americas. Roger Bates is also a former principal of the award-winning and noted architecture practice KieranTimberlake in their research group. While there, he led the effort to create Tally, a life-cycle assessment software application for Revit. Tally is the industry’s first LCA app that enables architects to calculate the lifecycle impacts of their building material selections directly inside Autodesk Revit.
Visualizing Building Performance is the next track Chaos is integrating with core design in AEC. Their partnership with IES for its engine immediately gives high-level credibility to the types of results produced by Enscape. These features are still in beta and were previewed for us at AIA24.
With this background in sustainable architecture and a degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Bates is particularly well-suited to lead Chaos’ next phase of development focus for Enscape. Bates led a presentation for us at AIA24, where we saw some early direction for Enscape’s visualization of building performance.
The way Chaos and the Enscape team see the AEC workflow today is both design, visualization, and building performance are discreet and often disconnected workflows—what the software firm calls “tracks.” On the “design track,” visualization was previously removed from the design process, where design often needed to stop while 3D artists created visualizations. Enscape solves this interruption by integrating and democratizing visualization, thereby giving all architectural designers the means to visualize while they design.
Using colored spaces, Enscape will leverage its rendering engine to help architects and designers “visualize” building performance characteristics. A panel for numerical results and input is located at the left side of the screen.
The same problem has largely been true of building performance. Work on the design track would need to stop while data is collected, decisions are made, and engineers and building performance experts run a comprehensive building performance analysis. For Chaos and the Enscape team, the solution is to bring parts of the building performance track into the design track, integrating both general architectural design and building performance into one unified workflow along with visualization.
At AIA24, we saw some early beta screenshots (see images above) of the way Enscape will visualize building performance, helping architects understand a building design’s carbon impact, energy use intensity, and peak loads, for example.
2 – Bridge: Connected Workflows
While Chaos works to democratize building performance and make it much more “visual” and integrated into the typical architectural design workflow, the company is also actively streamlining the workflows between two sets of professionals—architects and dedicated professional 3D artists in visualization agencies or dedicated studios in large architecture firms.
This is fundamentally about solving data interoperability and leveraging previous work done by both parties. As envisioned, Chaos offers Enscape for real-time interactive visualization inside the market’s most popular dominant design and modeling tools. The designed connection is between Enscape and Chaos V-Ray so that an architect working inside a BIM solution can begin a 3D scene, visualize it in Enscape, and then push that scene to a dedicated DCC (digital content creation) 3D artist working in Chaos V-Ray.
Chaos’ Connected workflows bridge the gap between architects and 3D artists so that workflow separation is eliminated.
To solve this problem, Chaos has further democratized architectural rendering skills, bringing Enscape into every single major BIM and 3D design modeling application. These include the popular BIM applications from Nememtschek in Archicad and Vectorworks, market leader Autodesk Revit, to McNeel’s Rhino 3D and Trimble’s SketchUp. This likely addresses close to 90 percent of the global architectural design market, where architectural design occurs at the application level.
To address a similar percentage of where professional digital content creation (DCC) occurs inside visualization agencies and studios, Chaos’ V-Ray works inside leading visualization platforms like Autodesk 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, Houdini, Blender, and Unreal.
The development of a new Chaos (.vrscene) data file format enables Enscape scenes to export out (.vrscene) files that act as containers for transferring render-ready scene data. This container, if you will, holds the geometry assets, lighting assets, material assets, and rendering settings cameras.
The new file format’s bridge technology allows scenes to move between Chaos tools, including Vantage and future tools. This allows both design firms and visualization studios to interact faster and more seamlessly, which should increase engagement with studios. You can watch this technology in action here at this webinar recording.
3 – AI Technologies
Chaos is keenly aware of the AI boom in AEC/O and the role AI technologies are already playing in the visualization workflow. One area being explored at Chaos is how AI can be used to create artistic rendering styles. Check out this animation by Farhan Riaz, an architect and applications engineer at Chaos, here over on his LinkedIn page for a “sneak peek” of what I am talking about.
At AIA24, Dan Monaghan and Roger Bates of Chaos talked to us about the technology they were calling AI Enhancer. This technology was tapping the power of AI to improve the rendering visualization of both people and plants inside Enscape. The issue with real-time renderers is that poly-intensive objects are demanding to render in real-time. A human being’s face is a poly-intensive object; buildings are generally made up of flat surfaces or smooth curved surfaces. Plants and people are the weak points in visualization, so the AI Enhancer technology is working in a similar way to how AI is improving pictures of people today. (see the image below).
A screenshot from a Chaos blog post on AI Enhancer in Enscape.(Image: Chaos)
If you have used Enscape, Lumion, or Twinmotion, you are already aware of the way people look. Well bodies from a distance are okay, it is in the face that the visualization falls down. The image above shows the improvement possible with Chaos AI Enhancer at play. This also works on vegetation assets in Enscape scenes, though the improvement is sometimes harder to appreciate compared to human faces. AI Enhancer is in preview mode and has not yet been released. It is coming later this year.
At the moment, other future AI technologies for Chaos are being explored and closely withheld. The visualization market is crowded with intense competition, but Chaos today offers the AEC/O market the most comprehensive set of solutions for visualizing every step of the workflow.