Eliot Blenkarne

This is fantastic feedback, thank you guys so much. I had been campaigning for threadripper CPUs but got drowned out by the more-core group, so I will certainly be raising this with them. With that said, they're still 3.4GHz, so hardly "slow" I'd have thought. Otherwise, in my case at least, most of the points above are usually addressed, so I'll have a chat to IT about network speeds. Scott - your candor is appreciated, hoping you could drill down on the "magical process" aspect?

Hi all, I'm hoping to get a sense of clarity about how other studios operate a reliable-ish workflow in 2021, from a software + hardware standpoint. The reason I ask is due to the obscene amount of time myself and my team are wasting on software crashes/freezes, meaning jobs are dragging on, we're losing money and working extremely long days to make up for it. I estimate 50% of my standard working day is wasted re-opening files or waiting for max to respond. I'm in a western country with decent pay figures, so the $$$ will be mounting quickly. I cannot imagine that this is the standard way to work, or that dedicated viz companies operate like this. Our software package for modelling/rendering is 3dsMax 2021 + Corona 6 (soon to be 7). We use the typical array of plugins; Itoo package, Sini etc. We use Project Manager by K Studio for managing assets in our libraries. Our individual machines are dual xeon/256gb RAM/dual SSD/3090 weapons that are likely way overpowered. We are under ongoing pressure due to the arrival of Enscape in our studio, and to be frank it feels very justified given how painfully inflexible the workflow seems to be becoming from our side of the coin. I imagine there are a few variables in play here, and I certainly do not profess to being a technical power user, but I am very prepared to learn and listen to those with far more wisdom and experience than I. So to get the ball rolling, I might suggest some areas to focus on; Have others had these same issues, and if you've started to fix them, how did you do so? Any common knowledge in the viz world of crap plugins or the like going around that might cause this? We are a large-ish architecture firm (350+ employees), so we are dependent on everything feeding through an established network - are there others in a similar situation who have found a specific way to work more efficiently? Any other suggestions around workflow - it seems to make very little difference as to how well a file is managed in terms of layers/xrefs, but I am open to hearing anything at this point. As basic as it can possible be through to more advanced, gimmie anything! I want to go to our IT department somewhat prepared to get things moving if that is what is needed. We have one "old head" who runs our team - the rest of us are 2 - 10 years in the game, so I'm wondering if there is a knowledge issue? Thanks all.

What are you trying to do? That's what it comes down to. We have an advanced computational team where I work, and they struggle to match a 50 year old architect using SketchUp when it comes to fleshing out an idea, testing or just quickly iterating on an idea using Rhino+GH (in the area where those workflows overlap, usually concept, certainly not fenestration etc). Likewise, when they want to see an updated detail in some of our viz work, they get frustrated with the intricacies of max. There's no doubt both of these programs are far more powerful than SketchUp, but the "dumb" nature of SketchUp makes it a lower threshold and faster for our architect friends who aren't in a position to learn Rhino/Max/Blender etc. That's not in their batting arc. It doesn't exist in the gaming and cinematic world practically speaking for good reason! Stick at it, I've used SketchUp since 2010 and it's really pretty amazing once you get to grips with it. Once you accept it is software that encourage a loose and "flawed" workflow, you can just have fun and explore a bit.

We never give them an ultimatum, unless it NEEDs to be of the ultimate high quality (marketing, usually). I'd have to disagree in terms of time/setup - though only when using SketchUp. I can get a concept model at midday, and by the end of the day have it neatly organised, proper materials from our library applied, populated and detailed to practically the same level that can be achieved in max... which may be possible in max too, but what is almost certainly not possible is the ability to iterate on cameras and lighting. We can pump out dozens of images in no time, with totally different compositions and light setups. It really is very fun and makes one think about the future. Other artists in the team reckon they can do it in max... but it just never happens. Usually there is some import issue, layers missing, max crashes 37 times, some random issue in a plugin pops up... all of a sudden, two days are gone and our designers are getting frustrated. We have very experienced artists (20+ years), and this stuff happens to everyone. Revit is next cab off the rank, and some technicians in our company are already pushing into our world pretty swiftly. Sometimes I feel traditional archviz tools seem overkill compared to the actual process of creating a good image - and it seems the architectural industry is reacting to this finally. You point around upskilling is likely the most valuable take-away from this chat I think - we're lucky inasmuch that all these things are fun to learn and play with, so it's not really a chore!

In house, based in NZ. As Scott ^ has alluded to, a serious shift underway for us over the last 18+ months. Incidentally, I was going to start a thread that touches on this topic, in a sense, and I'd be interested to hear how others are dealing with this issue. With the rise of software like Enscape (which I enjoy using and supporting design teams with), I feel we have a new battle, one of quality apathy. I'm interested to hear how other teams around the world grapple with the "this image the design team has pumped out of Enscape and Revit for a competition/RFP/concept/DD /etc document is good enough to use and we won't bother with the viz team" attitude. I have moved to Enscape almost fulltime, supporting design teams. It has been really successful for the most part, with almost high-end quality produced in a fraction of the time, but we are finding some studios/individuals still resist. It constantly surprises me how low the standards of designers are when it comes to visuals - clients I can somewhat understand, but it does feel sometimes like visuals become this bartering tool where teams cut any budget from their projects just to keep clients on side. This isn't a chicken little "I'm going to become irrelevant" situation - I'm busier than ever, but certainly I'm seeing more people just accepting quick and dirty enscape renders. As a side, I have a full series of tutorial videos on our intranet, have studio contacts and travel to these studios regularly (bar our Australian studios for obvious reasons). I'd just appreciate any ideas on how to encourage a focus on quality and consistency and actually giving a damn rather than the "this'll do" mentality. Open to critique of course.

Enscape. I've used Lumion and Enscape a bit - Lumion is just too easy to get carried away with, and you end up in the VRay world of project length all too easily. Sometimes having a limit on what you can do is a good thing, particularly as a beginner. Like Scott has said, Enscape is quick, and good enough and allows you into the world of VR too, not to mention the other aspects that make it such a strong package. I might add - I'm a fulltime visualiser for an architecture firm, and Enscape has actually given us more work to do. Architects just aren't interested in spending time of visuals if they don't have to - even if it's seconds. They'd rather give us the file, and leave the rest to us, and this applies to the VR side of things too.

I have the sneaking suspicion this is taking the piss

I think it's a fair piece of commentary to be honest.

For us, being able to get render elements out of UE4 would be a godsend, and one thing holding back the wider adoption of it. Like has been mentioned, Datasmith-converted materials become too complex and cumbersome to be able to edit in real time, making them semi-redundant, so being able to quickly edit things in PS would be nice. Broader corrections are easy enough using the post-process volume. There is a plugin for camera correction, though I've not tried it. I don't necessarily agree regarding wages, - what UE4 can do far outstrips a traditional viz workflow, and Datasmith represents a tiny amount of it. If someone is skilled in UE4, they're opening your company up to a pretty interesting variety of work, and if that's something valuable to your company, they should be paid accordingly. If you want to produce real-time VR with interactivity and slick menus, or a car configuration mechanism, or some form of HTML game - or all of these, whilst remaining linked to the viz world, it's hard to look past UE4. Again, it depends on what is valued in your firm, IMO highly-skilled specialists tend to get paid more than generalists. This applies to more than just UE4 though. For mine, UE4's biggest weakness is in-fact what is perceived as its strength - it can do a lot of different things, but not necessarily that well, as nothing is as simple or well-developed as the traditional archviz workflow (like you hint at being your concern). Even lighting is unpredictable - you need only check out the Epic forums to see people battling to get consistency. Sometimes, things just break randomly and your lighting just stops working. Everything seems to be a case of roll the dice, try things out and see what happens, then make incremental changes. It remains quite a big jump - coming from someone using it full-time for nearly 3 years, I still struggle with it sometimes. For mine, those jobs that need quite a bit of post-pro work or camera matching, UE4 is still difficult to justify implementation. Powerful, but flawed!

There's a 2gb limit on map size if you want to package it up. But you can have multiple maps in a scene, so it's not really an issue. As for poly count, it depends on a lot of other factors, so it's really up to the artist to keep an eye of performance as they work.

First one looks like Z fighting. Move the infinite plane down 100mm, see if that fixes it. Second issue is could be a few things. I would check the texture dimensions firstly, but ideally you would want to use something like Skatter to place 3d grass on the surface

I work for a large architecture firm in the South Pacific. AFAIK we're the only firm in our country using UE4 at this level. We're working with our marketing team on our own website, will post something when that's up.

Not really a shareable sort of project I'm afraid. Took me 8 weeks of 18 hour days to make it happen though!

Yip, Have used UE4 on a billion dollar skyscraper project (pre Datasmith - painful to say the least), but the quality is extremely high and the experience smooth. Hard to justify the laborious process as it stands, even with Datasmith We use Enscape a lot, it's not really that practical for VR usage for complex models, unless you turn the quality down - even on our dual xeon, 1080TI equipped machines. But for 360s, basic walkthroughs and stills, it's remarkably useful and insanely quick

Also, Lumion 8 isn't exactly real-time - you don't navigate the scene at the final render quality, so it's no good for real-time walkthroughs like UE4/Unity can be. Scenes are still rendered "per frame", just extremely quickly.