+1 Please Chaos! Give us Volumetric Lighting so we can make stage designs!
Hi @Knut_Fredrik_Valsgar, @suguru, and everyone following this thread,
@suguru, you asked for an update twice and got silence both times. That isn’t good enough, and I’m sorry.
For a long time our rendering work centred on performance: making sure Enscape runs well on everything from modest laptops to high-end workstations. Against that goal, volumetric lighting for artificial lights looked like a large computational cost for something that would serve a smaller group of users, so it didn’t move up the list. A lot has changed since this thread started, in GPUs and in real-time rendering techniques. We’re now taking a closer look at the engine itself, at quality as well as performance and stability, and decisions like this one are part of that re-evaluation. I can’t give you a date, but this is a good moment to understand exactly how you’d use it, so that whatever we build solves the right problem.
Thank you to @georgelegner, @DeKoetsier, and @Knut_Fredrik_Valsgar for explaining the stage and event use case, and to @joelbeeby and @Pax0 for raising gobos and projection. Answer whichever of these you can; even short replies help.
Your work
- What kind of work do you do: stage and event design, architecture, interiors, retail, something else? If you’re an architecture or interiors practice, how often do your projects need visible light beams?
- What does the scene show the client or the designer? For example, the mood of a lighting design, where fixtures are positioned, or how a space feels at night.
The problem today
- What do you do now instead: fog from the Atmosphere tab, fake beams made from geometry, or a different tool for those shots? How much time does it add to a project?
- What happens when you can’t show beams: does the client misread the design, does the project need extra review rounds, or have you lost work?
Setup
- Which host app and version do you use (SketchUp, Revit, Rhino, Archicad, Vectorworks), and on Windows or Mac? @suguru, I know Mac with SketchUp matters for you.
- Do you show this as stills, as video, or live and in VR?
If stage or lighting work is a regular part of what you do and you’re up for a 30-minute call to show me a project, please reply here or send me a private message.
Thanks for keeping this thread alive. I’ll post here when there’s something concrete to share.
Petr
Amazing! Thank you for the reply! My son was born 3 days ago so I will answer you more in depth after a short leave!
But for short: A lot of the time, we are interested to show what the light beam does in the air/haze, as opposed to what the light is hitting, or the “selv illuminated” lens.
Here is a very simple render for sales where I have added a beam to 4 moving lights to show what effect it will actually have in the haze. This was done in photoshop.
I mostly need to be able to show a tight beam, a more defuse zoom’able wash, and if possible, a gobo in the air.
The more tunable settings the better!
Real time performance is not important and dynamic resolution scaling/downsampling is perfectly acceptable when moving the camera around, as im mostly intressted in the static/exported renders looking nice.
If you are looking for good volumetric lighting referance for stage lighting, take a look at Syncrom Depence R4. If Enscape looks anything like this, you have a cash cow on your hands. As exporting lots of small changes to Depence is a chore.
Also: let us be able to set a default time of day when opening enscape.
And another thing: a tool for adding random crowds would be amazing.
I work on a MacBook Pro M5 Pro with 48gb of ram. Using Vectorworks 2027
I’m happy to help!
Thank you for bringing this back up!
I am mostly in event design but that includes stages as well. Volumetric lighting is a nice-to-have to bring more dynamism/mood to spatial renders, especially darkened showrooms where we may have distinct spotlights on individual products.
Currently we will add light beams in photoshop which adds another step. Especially for retail window displays where we want to show how to angle the existing lighting.
GOBO/projection would be great to not only sell concepts but also test projection mapped footage in the environment.
SketchUp on Mac.
Thanks!