The AEC industry’s leading visualization software provider, Chaos, has delivered significant updates to six industry-proven software tools, helping architects and visualization professionals improve and accelerate workflows.
New Capabilities
The updates add more than 20 new capabilities across lighting, scene population, AI materials, and more. Teams can now deliver and work within an uninterrupted workflow from ideation through review and approvals, within the Enscape design workflow.
Chaos has delivered major updates across over six products.
“Architects need to deliver more, faster, with less— while adapting to AI transformation,” said Petr Mitev, VP Product, Solutions for Designers. “Our end-to-end design and visualization workflow gives them integrated solutions that eliminate workflow friction from their first moments with Enscape to their final presentations, so they can focus on design instead of managing disconnected tools.”
Design Faster from the Start
Used throughout the architectural world, Enscape is one of the easiest ways to visualize CAD/BIM data in real time and is often most people’s entry point into the Chaos design ecosystem. Today, architects can take advantage of:
- Asset Brush Placement — Used for rapid scene population, 3D assets can now be painted into designs for refined creative control and instant visual feedback. Since assets are fully connected to the original BIM model, choices will remain consistent as projects evolve.
- Centralized Light Management — Users can now manage all of their light sources via a centralized list, removing the need for manual searches. Multiple presets can also be added to a single scene, making it easy to test, compare and refine lighting scenarios without duplicating views or breaking the workflow.
- AI Material Generator — Architects can now create custom 3D materials with real-world photos. High-resolution outputs not only support close-ups and final presentation deliverables, but encourage high-quality experimentation with finishes, surfaces and more — all without leaving the design environment.
- Consistent Assets from Design to Presentation — Assets placed in Enscape transfer cleanly into Envision, maintaining placement and quality across real-time and high-end workflows.
- Grass Visualization Improvements — More realistic grass rendering delivers denser, more natural-looking landscapes with better shading and detail.
- New Chaos Cosmos Assets — Over 1000 high-quality vegetation and branded assets – optimized for both real-time and high-end use cases – have been added to Enscape. These new assets are also designed to work seamlessly across Envision, Enscape and more.
There are also new AI-assisted ideation and design exploration features. Chaos says that AI is a rising star in AI-powered visualization and helps architects explore, ideate, and deliver moods and emotional imagery that propels projects forward through buy-in and approvals. Veras’ AI technologies work without breaking geometry or design intent.
New Cosmos assets are part of this round of updates. Over 1,000 high-quality vegetation and branded 3D assets have been added to Enscape.
Major updates include:
- Render Engine 7 — The recently released Veras 4 now comes with a new AI rendering engine powered by Google’s Nano Banana Pro. The new engine delivers cleaner, higher-fidelity images with fewer artifacts, so architects can cycle through faster ideations while working with SketchUp, Rhino, and Revit.
- Image as Input — Designers can now generate concepts using reference images like photos, plans or sketches on a napkin, offering one of the fastest ways to visualize full scenes without a prompt.
- Gallery Mode — A grid-based, thumbnail view of past renders has been added, making it easier to compare variations over time.
- New Video Presets — Twelve video presets provide render-ready animation settings for smooth, photorealistic motion, balanced lighting, and various cinematic styles.
Of course, more than Enscape obtained new updates. Chaos Envision has also been updated with significant new capabilities. The higher-end standalone visualization software that only runs on Windows and uses its own rendering engine gains several features that will help architects visualize, animate, and produce fully interactive scenes with complex multi-element interactions, such as traffic and crowds. New features include:
- Live CAD Linking — Envision now includes live links to Revit, SketchUp, and Rhino, ensuring that all changes are reflected in the original CAD file.
- Cinematic Camera Movements — Users can now create smooth, natural camera paths with refined motion control for more polished and intentional walkthroughs.
- Animation Smoothing — Improve the flow of animations with smoother transitions and better interpolation between keyframes.
- Advanced Light Controls — Refine and adjust lighting with greater precision to achieve more accurate mood and presentation quality.
- New HDRIs — 20+ New Chaos Cosmos HDRIs expand your environment options, making it faster to set up realistic lighting and contextual backdrops.
Chaos Cloud, the software firm’s cloud service, helps teams do more together through collaboration, design reviews, and cloud rendering. Added to this are now these new abilities:
- Centralized Reviews — Chaos Cloud now helps teams share, review, and improve designs directly in the cloud, removing the need for downloads or external tools.
- 3D Streaming — Architects can now stream scenes directly from Enscape, providing full fidelity reviews from any remote location.
These features will aid architects in getting faster approvals within their workflows.
Performance Insights
Chaos has been focused on helping architects meet sustainable design objectives for several years now through its Enscape Impact product line. Impact helps teams understand energy analysis early in the design process, when larger impact decisions come more easily and with less rollback on interrelated decisions. New additions include:
- Thermal Comfort Analysis — Architects can now determine if a building will hit the sweet spot between too hot or too cold for occupants, assessing everything from air temperature to humidity in moments.
- Performance Summaries — All performance reports can now be exported and shared amongst relevant stakeholders, ensuring sustainability goals are being hit before decisions become too costly.
All of these new tools and updates benefit Chaos workflows and will help architects communicate more effectively with end users and clients. Chaos says that while each tool is designed to carry out specific workflows, sometimes from end to end, the Bulgarian-originated software firm says users should consider mixing and matching products to fully leverage the technical leadership and features Chaos offers.
New ThermalComfort measures are added to the energy-facing analysis tools for Enscape Impact. Architects can now determine and visualize thermal comfort in their designs.
New architectural design offering updates will be released on a quarterly basis. Stay tuned to Chaos’ blog and social channels for sneak peeks.
Price and Availability
The ArchDesign Collection update is available now for users with an annual license. The collection includes Enscape, Veras, Envision, Chaos Cosmos, Chaos Cloud, and Enscape Impact, and all subsequent updates as long as the subscription lasts. For full pricing details, please visit the ArchDesign Collection pricing page.
About Chaos
Founded in 1997, Chaos provides world-class visualisation and design solutions that empower creative minds to bring ideas to life.
The company serves multiple industries, including architecture and design, media and entertainment, and product e-commerce, providing an ecosystem of accessible tools that support every stage of the design and creation process. Its innovative solutions help architects, designers, VFX artists/animators, and other creative professionals share ideas, optimize workflows, and create immersive experiences.
Headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, Chaos has offices in 11 cities worldwide. For more information, visit chaos.
Architosh Analysis and Commentary
Envision’s live links to SketchUp, Rhino, and Revit are a big deal and will be greatly appreciated by users of Envision and those dominant CAD/BIM platforms. The Thermal Comfort analysis with Enscape Impact is also a significant end-user benefit to architects to ensure that their designs offer thermally balanced and comfortable environments for owners and users. And finally, the Enscape streaming to Chaos Cloud is another boost for users to leverage the Chaos Cloud in their workflows.
We have already written about Veras 4.0 with Nano Banana Pro and all that it can do. The big improvements there (and yet we have not tested this ourselves) are the engine’s better understanding of the architect’s intent, especially in holding to intentional geometry. All these updates continue to add value to architects’ workflows, and we suspect that most practices still lag in leveraging the full capabilities of Chaos’ software tools. The Architectural Design Collection (which includes Enscape, including both Veras, their AI tool, and Enscape and Enscape Impact, the latter two likely not being fully appreciated in the market) could help solve this problem by getting these tools into more users’ hands.
