Thea Render - Interactive Rendering

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.

solo · 2 Aug 2011, 03:07

I saw your thread regarding Podium but chose not to say anything, however now that you are looking at Thea let me say this:

Unlike most render apps Thea is studio based so you are not limited to Sketchup's crappy poly limits.
Add as much trees as you wish in Thea.
Thea is both biased and unbiased, but lets not get you confused right now, why not download the free version, watch the videos and see if it's for you.

Thea is not really a entry level app, Podium and Shaderlight are, so maybe learn with them, until you require more control, bells and whistles then look at Thea. I used Podium for many years before moving to Vray and finally to Thea as I wanted to get more realism and control over my renders.

Gaieus · 2 Aug 2011, 12:11

@solo said:

I used Podium for many years...

Yes, Pete presented podium at Google 3D BaseCamp 2008

patrickbateman · 3 Aug 2011, 03:31

oh wow this is cool

I still just bought podium v2 since it is more useful for most of the small projects I do but thea is going to be a great tool to get some jaw dropping renders on our bigger commercial projects with high poly plants.

I think I'm going to go buy a bunch of evermotion and xfrog plants now. Will I have to tweak their materials much in thea? I know evermotion has stuff preconfigured for vray, will I have to tweak much or will they work just dropped into a thea scene?

How do number of polys correspond to render time? Will lots of plants significantly slow down render time or can I expect to still get reasonable speeds? Now let's say I build all my hardscape stuff in sketchup then import to thea and insert my plants and edit materials. What about 3D grass, what's the best way to apply 3D grass to a whole surfaces and where can I get some good models of 3D grass to use? I know I have a lot of questions but thea is really exciting and I want to jump in and be able to show off so I can convince my work to buy it!

solo · 3 Aug 2011, 03:48

@unknownuser said:

I think I'm going to go buy a bunch of evermotion and xfrog plants now. Will I have to tweak their materials much in thea?

I'll tell you what, I'm gonna render my Airstream trailer tomorrow, I'll add an Evermotion tree so you can see how it works.

As for polys vs render speed, I have never seen a slow down based on poly's I rendered the above scene in 22 minutes (20 million polys, Xfrog trees)

Grass can be added as a texture with bump, displacement or scattered (painted) as grass objects as your heart and ram desires.
There are many free grass solutions on the Thea forums as well as a whole lot of great materials.

Once you get going with Thea and know what you are doing, you will not want to touch anything with less bells and whistles.

OT: the next release will have a whole lot of cool features (I cannot discuss right now) and the speed will be 2x faster, and it already is fast.

patrickbateman · 3 Aug 2011, 04:03

@solo said:

@unknownuser said:

I think I'm going to go buy a bunch of evermotion and xfrog plants now. Will I have to tweak their materials much in thea?

I'll tell you what, I'm gonna render my Airstream trailer tomorrow, I'll add an Evermotion tree so you can see how it works.

As for polys vs render speed, I have never seen a slow down based on poly's I rendered the above scene in 22 minutes (20 million polys, Xfrog trees)

Grass can be added as a texture with bump, displacement or scattered (painted) as grass objects as your heart and ram desires.
There are many free grass solutions on the Thea forums as well as a whole lot of great materials.

Once you get going with Thea and know what you are doing, you will not want to touch anything with less bells and whistles.

OT: the next release will have a whole lot of cool features (I cannot discuss right now) and the speed will be 2x faster, and it already is fast.

Awesome, I appreciate it. So polys don't have a huge speed impact in thea? I guess I'm used to render engines based in sketchup where the large models cripple the render speed. If I don't use podium much it's no big deal since I had an upgrade for $49 from a past student version I had. 2x faster speed will be great. Now is the interactive render GPU based or is anything GPU enhanced? I have a decent 1gb video card, 3.4ghz i7 quad core, and 8gb ram so I'm hoping thea will really take advantage of my pc nicely. It would be amazing if they built a render engine that used both GPU and CPU at the same time.

Gaieus · 3 Aug 2011, 12:17

@patrickbateman said:

It would be amazing if they built a render engine that used both GPU and CPU at the same time.

It is going to be combined (CPU+GPU) but for the time being (at least the public release) is only CPU. I am also hoping to see GPU rendering there soon (according to the original road map, still this year).

patrickbateman · 3 Aug 2011, 12:29

Sweet. Ok so just curious, aside from the interactive piece what can Thea do that other rendering engines can't, what can Thea do better than other top engines, and what does something like vray have going for it over thea?

patrickbateman · 3 Aug 2011, 16:37

I posted this on the thea forum but my posts have to be approved for some reason...

I have a bunch of evermotion plants in .max format textured for vray. I want to be able to insert these into thea with textures. I don't know anything about 3ds max and just installed it to do conversions at this point (learning it is another project). I try exporting the models to thea but they come into thea without textures. I try using the material converter and it converted one material and changed everything else to gray.

How can I convert these models for use in thea and get most of the textures to work?