Thea Render Release Date!

bmscmoreira · 3 Feb 2011, 22:21

Dear friends, Thea Render has an oficial release date: 21st February. It's a great engine I've been playing with since the beta testing phase and it has a great integration with Sketchup. The message from the developers below:

"Dear friends,

Thea Render is a new renderer with multiple render modes (unbiased and biased), interactive render, a unique material system, advanced studio and many other features that we are researching and creating with a lot of love for 3 years now. Starting from the previous year, the renderer is going under an open beta testing phase and it has been available from our website along with exporter plugins (for 3dsMax, Blender, Cinema4D, Rhino, SketchUp, SoftImage and the upcoming for Modo).

If you would like to see a collection of images rendered using Thea, you can check out our fresh 2011 Showreel on Youtube or ShowReel on Facebook, where you are very welcomed to join us.

We have finally a release date to announce! We feel that we have finished a first cycle of our development and besides ironing out the application, there were quite a lot of tech advances. We believe that Thea has already reached a high level of quality/stability and so, our release date is set for 21st of February! This is also when we will end our promotional discounted prices on Thea and associated plugins.

A release date means also a lot to us. It is a new "starting point" to go even further, making Thea standing out of competition. We are very excited to see what the future brings and we would like to insist that Thea star will only be rising.

Yours

Thea Render Development Team"

Original message can be found at http://www.thearender.com/cms/index.php/news/press-releases.html.

Gaieus · 4 Feb 2011, 13:25

Yes, Notareal has already mentioned:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=305863#p305863
(and The Daily CatchUp, too:
http://news.sketchucation.com/thea-render-rc-and-release-date/ )

Good news and hopefully the beginning of a success story!

Chris Fullmer · 5 Feb 2011, 02:59

Though Notareal's post only mentioned that they had released an RC (release Candidate) to the beta program. It did not mention a release date (though I see now that he linked to the article on THea's site that does offer the actual date....so I guess he did in a round about fashion off the same info). So this post does offer new info. Just seeing that an RC had been released was pretty exciting, but to see them commit to a date made me really excited.

Anyhow, I'm very excited about this release and the release date. I've already got all my machines updated!

Chris

Frederik · 19 Feb 2011, 12:19

@unknownuser said:

We decided to move our release date 1 week later due to increased interest in Thea along with the fact that we want to have RC3 and Modo plugin published before this date.

So, the release date is set to March 1st and of course, the beta pricing is extended to this date.

I have suggested already in some e-mails, that there must a new Murphy's law:
The moment you announce a release date, there is lot more interest and some new bugs kicking in that make impossible to keep the date.

Anyway, release or not, updates are/will be coming out regularly. For RC3, we made some very substancial improvements,
each one of them could have been a release candidate on its own!

Anisotropy is now better than ever, fully consistent.

Displacement mapping is even more robust; we found and fixed cases with disappearing polygons due to bad normal input.

Bump mapping is (finally) working and it is working perfectly! Both in visual terms and noise terms (no fireflies anymore!).

Lights, sun-sky and display of Thea has been "recalibrated" according to luminance analysis, so as to yield 100% correct scale results for the lighting engineer.

Glasses/mirrors are traced (a little) better in unbiased engines.

So, now you know what is taking so long for RC3 to come out.

Gaieus · 19 Feb 2011, 12:38