I hope I am posting in the right place! Please let me know if I am not.
I know rendering is not the focus of Softplan- and nor should it be, it should be about the design tools first, rendering second. But there are a few things (coming from a background as a 3D artist) that I find missing in the current tools and that I consider staples to CG- and would be nice to see to give us control over how our drawings come out for our clients.
Ambient Occlusion (AO) and Image Based Lighting (IBL)
I haven’t been able to tell if “Ambient Occlusion” does anything in DX11. Turning it on I expect to see contact shadows where any two surfaces meet, but it doesn’t appear to be doing anything to the shadows at all. Maybe I am missing something here?
I noticed an option for AO was completely gone from DX12. This may be due to the inclusion of Path Tracing / Ray Casting in DX12, which in theory should help sell contact shadows naturally due to a final gather of sorts. But path tracing alone does not give me the exact look I want, since the light is still directional. I want omni directional AO for the type of style I am going for, something akin to his-
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Right now, it seems like this kind of rendering is not possible to do inside Softplan. I'd like the ability to render out *just* AO if I want to (for the sake of post-comping in other program if desired, but also just for the look) - and in general, it'd be nice if AO was more apparent/obvious at all, and could be controlled by options in the program.
The other thing I’d really like to see, since path tracing is included- is the addition of image based lighting for the ability to use skydomes (HDR or not) to light the scene. This works easily enough in Unreal Engine. I figured if I made a sphere object, turned it inside out, imported that as a symbol, and put a texture on it and set its emissive to 100%+, that it would effectively be the same thing- but this ended up making the sky appear washed out and grey, and did not cast any light into the scene.
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If this had worked, I do think also being limited by texture size would have hurt the image based lighting as well.
Symbol Texture Scaling
A pain point for me with symbols is how textures come in. I can generate my own UVs and texture those UVs easily enough. But it appears if you want to use the texturing methods included in Softplan (and used on many of their symbols), it necessitates you exporting out a dwg from Softplan and then bringing it back in to get the coordinates to work right- as least, that is what we have seen on our end? (Also- you have to detoggle the "Scaling" button in order to turn scaling on? It seems counter-intuitive to me)
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And even then, it only works half the time- other times, it causes some really funky applications of the texture. A true triplanar projection of the texture onto the models with scaling available from the get-go would be nice.
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(Horrible texture here, but just using it to demonstrate what happens even with scaling and orthographic on)
Crop Images
Having the ability to crop images in a Plan Set would be nice. This does have a simple workaround- I can just use MS Paint- although it requires having to eyeball things to fit on a plan. Cropping images seems like a basic quality of life thing that would be nice to have.
Shrinking Text to fit inside box
On title blocks for plansets, it would be nice to set textboxes to ‘shrink’ (lower its text size) in order to accommodate fitting within a confined space and on just one line. Right now we have ‘Fit on Adjust’ and ‘Wrap on Adjust’ – but neither of these tackle this problem of fitting inside one confined area/ on a single line.
If anyone has any tips about any of these things (maybe I am overlooking a feature)- definitely let me know! Otherwise if these things do come down to limitations in the program, I do hope the folks at Softplan can consider these pain points as possible suggestions for new updates to Softplan. (I am posting in Softplan '22 since it's what we're primarily using, but I do run into these pain points in '24 as well).
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