Troubleshooting Common Errors in Enscape
Enscape is fast, beautiful, and easy to use. But last minute changes can create a cascade of errors just before a project deadline. Here's how to fix common problems to help you and your team deliver on time!
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It's Good To Be Back :)
While visiting with the Enscape team in Germany and Sofia, I had the privilege of sitting down with Helen Reinold and Demian?Gutberlet. You'll recognize Helen from her wonderful Enscape knowledge based articles. And you'll recall Damien from his many useful posts and patient feedback in the Enscape forums.?It was a wonderful meeting as I hadn't been back to the Enscape offices since Covid lockdowns!
Helen and Damian have each worked for more than six years as part of the Enscape team. They're a treasure trove of useful and experienced information. We had a wonderful reminisce about the early days of Enscape and how the company has grown. Once pleasantries ended, we discussed common "unforced" errors often encountered using Enscape and how to improve project workflow. Here's their tips!
Material Size Matters
Escape renders materials at 2K resolution. Those materials are probably being viewed on a 4K monitor. Your eyes can't tell the difference on your computer monitor from 2' away or large flat screen in a conference room 6' away. Additionally, Enscape downsamples textures greater than 2K down to 2K. This results in additional compute time when opening your project.
Once upon a time, a client had a restaurant project that was inexplicably crashing. When they sent a copy of the file and all the textures, it turned out that the texture for the napkins and table cloths were 8K resolution and represented a 1"x1" sample size! There were thousands of instances of the material in the project. The texture size was creating a memory issue, which was causing Enscape to crash. Once we replaced the image with a suitable texture the project opened without issue.
Material Location
Escape renders in real time, and the materials are not embedded in the project. Every time you open your design file in Enscape, all the materials are loaded on demand (and update in real time when you make changes). However, network speeds vary from office to office and home to office. If your project material files are distributed over multiple locations and great distances, this increases opening times. In some cases Enscape will time out and simply fail to open the project.
When possible co-locate your materials near your design file. If your project (and you) are working in an office in Chicago, put the project materials in a project subfolder in your office in Chicago. Don't link to materials from the office in Singapore, San Francisco and the UK. Copy the materials to your project folder in Chicago. Yes, this is redundant as you're copying materials that exist elsewhere. But it will also keep your project from crashing.
Entourage Poly Count and Detail
Why is it that Enscape gives you trouble just before a deadline? Among other things, it often has to do with last-minute entourage and set dressing. There's a lot of elements in design projects that have nothing to do with what's going to be built, but often have to do with giving the right emotional feel, and feedback to the project when rendering. However, not all entourage is created equal.
When opening your project in Enscape, everything in your design file is being rendered in real time by the graphic card. The geometry, lighting and materials are processed and stored in the memory of the the graphic card. If materials (as previously mentioned) and poly count is high, all of this detail has to be processed and stored in memory. When your graphic card runs out of memory the project may continue to work for a bit, but eventually, it will hit a wall. Your Enscape file is going to struggle and eventually crash.
Enscape entourage is optimized for rendering in Enscape. As you've noticed, the entourage in Enscape is simplified when viewed in the design file but highly detailed when rendering an Enscape. When downloading organic elements such as plants, soft furnishings and even fittings and fixtures for use in Enscape, these components frequently contain an over abundance of detail. It's a good idea to open those components and inspect them before presuming they'll be fine when adding to your design file. If a lot of entourage has been recently added to the project and Enscape keeps crashing, try turning off the layer with a newly added entourage and then restart Enscape. If Enscape doesn't crash, you've probably discovered the culprit.
Turn off Ray Traced Shadows and Hardware Acceleration.
The greater the detail, the greater the compute. Hardware-accelerated ray-tracing is a wonderful feature that increases realism when rendering your design in real-time. But if your graphic card is already stressed with file size, lighting, materials, and other complexities, it can be useful to turn off hardware features (temporarily). Turning off hardware features decreases compute as you make changes to your design file. Of course, it would be wonderful to see these features all the time. But if you have to choose between crashing during a client presentation and rendering with a little less detail, the second option is preferable.
Restart Enscape before Batch Rendering.
When you batch render, Enscape is going to navigate the project automatically between favored views before rendering each view. Each view can have its own settings for lighting, materials, visibility, time of day and more. Exporting larger image sizes is going to require more compute than smaller image sizes. If Enscape is crashing when rendering 8K images try dropping the export resolution down to 4K. Render times between exported images should increase as well.
Minimize GPU Resources
If your graphic card is running out of memory, closing GPU intensive applications and websites can help. Close Photoshop and other image editing tools. YouTube, Hulu, Twitch, Netflix and other streaming services are GPU intensive. These services can take up to 1GB of memory from your graphic card! As a result, running these applications will cause Enscape to crash even if the project isn't that large and complex. Better to keep GPU intenseive apps and web pages closed during tight deadlines.
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Appearance Vs Graphic Mode
Suspect all your project materials are causing Enscape to timeout, crash, etc.? Try turning off the materials so they don't display. This can be done in the General Settings>Material Selection option. Here's how:
First, close Enscape.
Next, Open the General Settings and change the Material Selection to Graphics
Finally, Restart Enscape.
When you restart Enscape, the real-world material assignments are replaced by the RGB material assignments in your design file. In addition to being less GPU intensive, your project should open faster. Enscape doesn't have to load and visualize all the additional detail and settings of the real-world materials.
Searching for Clues in Log Files
Log files contain clues to why your project is crashing. Before sending log files to the Enscape Support Team, consider taking a moment to look for clues that indicate the cause of the crashes.
Here's the location of the log files in Windows: %localappdata%\Enscape\Logs
Here's the location of the log files in OSX:
Now that you've located your log files, open the file in your favorite text editor and search for [Warn] and [Error] in the Log Files. Read the descriptions next to the warnings. But also look at a few messages above the warnings for additional clues.
I won't admit to speaking fluent log file! But take a look at the image above is from a recent customer project. Enscape kept crashing and the customer sent their log files. Using keyword search for text [Warn] and [Error] we were able to search the log file for any related error messages. The graphic card noted in the log file (Quatro 3000 RTX) is a fine graphic card, But I suspected the driver was out of date based on subsequent error messages. I recommended the customer update the graphic card driver directly from the NVIDIA website (not using Windows Update). I also recommend using the Studio Driver, rather than the Game Ready Driver.
Conclusion
Why does Enscape crash - and particularly right before a project deadline? Probably because there's so many changes to the project happening all at once. Individually, all these changes performed slowly and sequentially by one person might give a clue to the reason for the crash. But when many people are making multiple edits to the design file at the same time, it's hard to know why the project is crashing. Greater than 2K materials? Overly detailed entourage? GPU intensive applications and websites running in the background? Yes and more! The sum of the crashing is often greater than the parts. And let's face it - people are reticent to admit fault! When it's hard to tell what's breaking, remember: Log Files are your friend! Thanks Helen and Demian! :)
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That's it! I hope this tips and tricks article helps your team get the most out of Enscape.?Questions, suggestions or comments? How are you and your teams using AI to solve real-world, practical problems? Please add your feedback in the comments section below! :)
ReadThomas would love to help you succeed with?Enscape! Email us for a brief demo or best practices webinar for your team. If you purchase online, please let the?Enscape?team know that you heard about Enscape from Read Thomas. We'll provide your team with complimentary training, implementation and support for Enscape! www.readthomas.com.
Practice Technology Specialist @ Corgan | RID, EDAC, LEED AP BD+ C, WELL AP
7 个月What's your take on material files being stored on ACC instead of a server/local drive location?