Thea Render - Interactive Rendering

notareal · 18 Mar 2011, 18:09

Thea Render v1.0.7 Revision 481 (16 March 11) available at the development forum.

Dear friends,

this is another quick revision with small fixes here and there.

Quality-wise, there is a small improvement when rendering non-power-of-2 textures (for example, 200x200 instead of 256x256); they will appear sharper. The difference will be negligible though for high-resolution textures. Additionally, an important bug on MacOSX reading XML files from SU plugin has been now resolved.

One nice addition in this revision, is that you can place (manually) the sun so that it matches the image used for sky illumination. This was asked in the past as a means to "align" the sun and IBL. This is possible because - starting from this revision - the image, in the IBL slot, is displayed in the OpenGL gizmo, whenever the sun is selected. Check the description page below, to see the series of steps needed to take advantage of this feature.

As always you can find the download links and changes log in the following thread:
http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=1849

best wishes

notareal · 30 Mar 2011, 18:29

Thea Render v1.0.8 Revision 486 is available at the Thea development forums.

This revision has also 2 major improvements.
First is the improved sampling of diffuse and rough glossy surface in the presence of IBL for Adaptive BSD method. Especially, when the lighting in the IBL has a lot of variation.

Second, a big workflow improvement has been added. We can now save Sky/IBL/Sun settings with a few clicks and easily apply them later in another scene. This way, you can easily now create your sky libraries (including your sun settings) and restore them with a simple drag & drop in the Viewport.

Changes Log

Thea Render v1.0.8 Revision 486 (30 March 11)

Fix for evaluation of grayscale non-power-of-2 bitmaps (bug introduced in previous public revision RV481). (all engines)
Hemisphere gizmo in OpenGL Viewport displaying HDRI is now independent of IBL intensity. (UI)
Added ability to save sky settings (through browser context menu) and restore by simple drag & drop into Viewport. (UI-I/O)
Browser icons have now 3 sizes (the previous 2 plus a higher resolution 150x150). Scene previews are also saved now in (higher) 150x150 resolution. (UI)
Corrected renaming and removal of IES files in browser. (UI)
Fixed chromaticity for sky previews and hemisphere gizmo. (UI)
Building of adaptive bitmap resolutions (for trilinear interpolation) is now taking place on demand (it is used only by Adaptive BSD). (memory management)
Some code refactoring with respect to resources. (refactoring).
Addition of secondary browser in studio, it can be accessed from Window > Browser #2. (UI)
Fixed minor bug where interpolation of HDR bitmaps was used as None despite having set to Bilinear/Trilinear. (all engines)
Vast improvement of diffuse and rough reflection sampling in the presence of IBL. (Adaptive BSD)
Added ability to save and restore backup files. (I/O)
Added automation for materials set selected ones to default min and max blurred subdivs. (UI)
Added Planar and Charles-Loop subdivision methods. (modeling)
Corrected tone mapping operations when used for bump mapping. (all engines)
Added ability to draw in OpenGL Viewport with full triangulation, key '' is the default one. (UI)
Fixed min/max emitter rays taken correctly into account now by direct light estimator. (Adaptive BSD)
Fixed render region brightness when Progressive (BSD) is used in darkroom rendering. (Progressive BSD)
Fixed peculiar crash when saving scene. (I/O)
Corrected time stamping of signed installers. (Windows/Installation)

notareal · 19 Apr 2011, 14:28

Thea Render Revision 491 is available at the development forum.

Thea is now improved in terms of noise when it comes to IBL lighting with Reflection and/or Refraction maps defined. Affecting both, the unbiased core as well as Adaptive BSD.
Another important addition in this revision is network rendering for Adaptive BSD! This works for still images (like unbiased modes) in a bucket rendering fashion.

notareal · 20 May 2011, 13:42

Technology Preview of Luminance/Illuminance Analysis

We are very happy to announce that Luminance/Illuminance Analysis has
been added in Thea render. Analysis can be saved as a html report.

Feature will be available with the next public revision.

notareal · 30 May 2011, 13:44

Thea Render Revision 504 with luminance and illuminance analysis is now available at the developement forums. A minitutorial for analysis is included in the revision annousement post.
The revision contains also some Adaptive BSD enchangements and fixes; rendering animation through the network has also been implemented.

notareal · 28 Jul 2011, 16:40

A little heads up and technology preview of next Thea Render release:

@unknownuser said:

Dear friends,

you know we are working hard "behind the scenes" to get the most out of Thea Render. And we are taking the opportunity, this summer period, to advance Thea to the next level. During the last weeks, we have worked on the core of the application and succeeded into achieving a remarkable speed boost that makes Thea up to 2 times faster!

In more detail about our achievement:

Render times are now decreased between 25% and 50%. This is true for all render modes although it is much more obvious for the unbiased modes TR1/TR2 - BSD shows a speed increase as well but depends more on the scene.

Construction of the environment (during initialization) is now multi-threaded. This means faster render startup and a more fluid interactive render!

There is a reduced memory footprint now - estimated between 10-20%, that makes it possible to render even heavier scenes.

The improvement is even more pronounced for heavily instanced scenes (with speed ups between 2x and 5x!) - a particular example can be seen below. The scenes that use displacement on the other hand show marginal improvement since displacement-on-the-fly is a different process to optimize.

We are sure you are going to love our new version. We are continuously working on various improvements and advances, so we believe next public revision will be an important milestone for us. Stay tuned!

best wishes

Original render. A heavy instancing scene rendered with our latest internal Thea Render x64 version. Scene created by Pentti Lahdenperä using Thea's instancing tool.

solo · 28 Jul 2011, 18:36

Holy sh*t!! 107 billion poly's

That must be a record of some sort.

notareal · 28 Jul 2011, 19:31

@solo said:

Holy sh*t!! 107 billion poly's

That must be a record of some sort.

Exactly 107642197634 polys, but basically the available memory is only limiting factor if you with 64-bit OS

solo · 28 Jul 2011, 19:36

So, I have pretty much the same comp specs as you, however I have 12GB ram, I should in theory be able to get 200 billion polys?

notareal · 28 Jul 2011, 20:44

Yes, something like that. Naturally there are other factors that can affect; like relight, render resolution, displacement or some unreleased feature

solo · 28 Jul 2011, 20:49

Not to worry I'm good at that.

Gaieus · 28 Jul 2011, 21:02

Damn you guys, keep your secrets silently, not hinting stuff here!

Rich O Brien · 28 Jul 2011, 21:13

I'll keep fingers crossed on GPU

notareal · 28 Jul 2011, 21:32

@unknownuser said:

:bounce:

I'll keep fingers crossed on GPU

GPU support is on the way (no date available yet), unfortunately it will take some time until they are ready for such massive use of RAM, that next version is ready for.

Rich O Brien · 28 Jul 2011, 22:20

I was just fishing for info. Looks like I'll have to wait for September or get on the beta

solo · 31 Jul 2011, 19:08

Wow, Thea instancing is smooth now, here is a quick test 21 million polys only (could have done 10 x this but there was no need)

Xfrog trees (heavy poly)

Pixero · 31 Jul 2011, 19:58

With "smooth" do you mean navigation in the Thea viewport with a lot of instances?

solo · 31 Jul 2011, 20:32

Yes, interactive (realtime) smooth.

Bob James · 1 Aug 2011, 06:17

This shameless teasing is just plain cruel, Peter

You know that my project production holdup is having to put very dense weeds, bushes and trees on a Google Earth topography of about 2 sq. miles of sloping and mountainous terrain

With my 32GB of ram and 24 cores of CPU, version 1.1 will finally allow me to finish the project.

You couldn't Dropbox me a beta could you?

patrickbateman · 2 Aug 2011, 02:59

Thea looks really over my head and I have very little idea how to use it but I am intrigued. 3D modeling is incredibly addicting and ever since I got my hands on some evermotion plant collection demos I have wanted to find a way to use them.

I am really loving sketchup and for landscape architecture the only thing I'm disappointed with is limited plants when there is some crazy high poly stuff out there I have wanted to use. I am used to podium one click rendering so this is intimidating.

Are there tutorials and things I can look at to get started? How can I integrate thea into my sketchup workflow where I do most modeling in sketchup then plants in thea? I'm not really sure how it works and how much more time I am looking at compared to something like podium or shaderlight. I am probably going to end up using both and looking into the thea route for high profile presentations. How does thea handle grass? I really just have no idea what I'm getting into here and appreciate any help/patience.