What’s happening ladies and gentlemen, this is Minh from Architecture Inspirations, I’m going to show you some materials tips and tricks in Enscape 2.2 for Sketchup. Let’s get started. First when you start Enscape, you will see that certain materials in your model look really good such as the glass material on these glassware, while other materials don’t look quite right, such as the tile material and the aluminum material here So to fix this, you need to understand the unique workflow of Enscape materials in Sketchup. To display materials realistically in Enscape, we need to use certain keywords in that Sketchup Material’s name. A few examples of the keywords include: Glass, Chrome, Metal, Ceramic, etc For example if I use the color picker tool here and sample this glass material, you can see that the name of the material is Wine Glass, and since glass is a keyword, Enscape will now render this material to look like Glass Same with these bowls and plates, which has materials with the keyword “Ceramic” in their name, that’s why they are a little bit reflective like Ceramic. But how come these tiles look so reflective? Let’s sample the material. As you can see, the name includes the word “Mirror”, which is also a keyword. But we don’t want it to look like a mirror, so we can remove that word, and there we go, it doesn’t look super reflective anymore. And since tiles are often ceramic, we can add the word ceramic in the name, and now it has the right amount of reflection. There we go, now we can use this workflow to adjust the materials in Enscape. Remember to check the spelling of the word as well. For example, this is supposed to be a Chrome Material, but it was misspelled, so I can just fix it like so and there we go, it looks better now he color of this chrome material is a little dark, I can adjust it by going to the Material Editor in Sketchup Let’s sample this material, which is supposed to be an Aluminum material, you can see that it has the word Aluminum in the name, but why does it not look like metal? That’s because the keyword is actually Aluminium. Aluminum is how Americans spell it, but Aluminium is how the British and most of the rest of the world spell it, both means the same thing, but in this case, we’re using Aluminium. So I’m going to add an “i” to the name and BAM, looks good! That’s how can you use keywords to adjust materials in Enscape, you can go to this link to get the full list, I will also leave this link in the description box as well. Another way to adjust materials is by using the new Material Editor in Enscape 2.2 To open it up, you can go to this Icon on the toolbar, or go to Extensions - Enscape - Enscape Materials. Here you will see several options to adjust materials. First is materials type. Most of the time your materials will be Generic Type. The Grass type can be used to quickly create realistic grass. You can use the Water type to create water material like what I did here. Foliage is used on vegetation materials like Leaves, to add some translucency to the material. Next on the list is Albedo, Albedo is the base color input, also known as Diffuse. The albedo color and texture settings in this Enscape material editor are exactly the same as that of the Sketchup Material editor. You can add a color in Enscape Material Editor here and it will reflect in Sketchup material editor. Similarly you can add a texture and it will show up here as well. What’s different here is that when you sample a material with a texture, you have the option to add a Tint color to the albedo or you can make the texture more faded. For example, the lines on this aluminum material is too prominent, I can lessen its visibility by reducing the image fade, I can also blend it with a different color but in this case I will leave it as a gray color. Next is Self Illumination. You can use this to create an emissive material. Just select the material you want to make emissive, then turn on Self Illumination. Here you can adjust the luminance or brightness of the material. I want it to be bright but it seems like the material is losing its original orange color. So I can add the color here But to have the exact color I can go in the albedo color, in the advanced tab, I can copy this Hex Code, and paste it in my Self Illumination color to have it emit the same exact color. Next is transparency, which is similar to the Opacity settings in the Sketchup Material Editor. You can adjust the transparency using this Opacity Slider. But note that when the opacity is at 0%, you can’t tint the glass with the Albedo color, but you have to use the tint color here to add color to the glass Next is the refractive index, which determines how lights bend through the glass. The frosted glass option lets you blur the material, but you also need to make some adjustments on the roughness to get the right effect. You can also add a texture to map the transparency of your object. This option allows you to create materials like the metal mesh here. Pretty cool huh? Next is the bump settings. For example, let’s take another look at these tiles that we edited earlier. These tiles are supposed to have indentations at the mortar lines, but here it looks really flat. So we can add a bump map by using this plus icon here. To load in a bump map Or we can Use the Albedo to create a bump map. After you’ve created a bump map, you can use this slider here to adjust the intensity. It’s a little hard to see how the bump map is affecting our material, so I’m going to go up here and fade out the albedo map like so to make it easier to see the effect. Pay close attention to how the material is rendered. In this case, you can see that the mortar lines are protruding upward when it’s supposed to be pushed downward. To flip it, I can simply changes the value from negative to positive, and there you go, the mortar lines look correct now. I can "unfade" my image to bring back the albedo map. Finally we have the reflections First you have Roughness, the lower the roughness value, the more reflective the material. On the website I mentioned earlier, you can reference this table here to see the roughness values of some common materials. Next is Metallic. This value should be 0 for non-metals or 100 for metals. For example, gold is a type of metal, so I can set that to 100, and now I can adjust the roughness to make it more reflective. The last setting is setting is Specular, which affects the fresnel intensity of a material. Here is an example of a material with Specular value of 0 and one with a value of 50. Similar to the other settings, you can also add a texture map to the reflection. For example, let’s take a look at the door frame metal material. Since this is a metal material, I will set the metallic slider to 100%. Next I will decrease the roughness to make it more reflective. To see the reflection easier, I will temporarily fade out our Albedo map, now take a look at what happens when I add a Reflection map. As you can see, the reflection is now more detailed and not as perfect as before, which makes it way more realistic. Now I can add in a bump map as well, Finally, I can unfade my albedo to bring back some color of the rusted metal like so. As you can see, with the new material editor in Enscape 2.2 there’s so much you can do to increase realism in your scene. You can also create materials from PBR textures like the ones you find on Poliigon, this will take your materials rendering skills to a whole new level. And that’s all for today guys, let me know if you’d like to see more videos on Enscape. Leave a like if you enjoyed the video, comment below if you have any suggestions, stay inspired guys, and I will see you, next time.
