Altair acquires Solid Iris
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Altair Acquires Solid Iris Technologies, Leader in Photorealistic Rendering and Visualization
/PRNewswire/ -- Altair has acquired Solid Iris Technologies, a Greece-based technology company specializing in photorealistic rendering and visualization, with...
(www.prnewswire.com)
Well done to all at Solid Iris. Look forward to seeing how the chapter unfolds.
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Wow, never heard of that company. Is this good or bad news?
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I'd imagine its largely related to product integration with the SolidThinking suite of software.
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I just bought a license for Thea for Rhino a week ago. I hope it wasn't a mistake.
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@pixero said:
Wow, never heard of that company. Is this good or bad news?
Hi Pixero,
actually, Altair had bought solidThinking a while back from an Italian company - FWIW, "sT" is a multi-platform (Mac-Win) NURBS-based modeler. Since the purchase they have indeed ramped up development and released quite a number of new/revamped-feature-rich versions of the main software AWA as a series of plugins...Best,
Diego
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I believe it's a good thing, with all their resources and talent I think Thea progress will be greatly accelerated.
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Interesting that I do not see anything about it on Altair's web site.
I am interested in finding out more about Thea and how it works with Animator. In particular about rendering speed when rendering an Animator animation. I sent them an email but they have not answered yet.
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As a very new user (see above), I'm disheartened.
Programs like Thea traditionally develop surrounded by a very tight group of users who, through their feedback on the forum and as beta testers, are instrumental in deciding which direction the software takes. The company that buys the software is a very different community and that company generally re-purposes the software to fit the needs of it's own users - which may not be the same as the needs of the original customers.
Fingers crossed that this will work out well.
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Thea is not yet a mature program ?
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@arail1 said:
As a very new user (see above), I'm disheartened.
Programs like Thea traditionally develop surrounded by a very tight group of users who, through their feedback on the forum and as beta testers, are instrumental in deciding which direction the software takes. The company that buys the software is a very different community and that company generally re-purposes the software to fit the needs of it's own users - which may not be the same as the needs of the original customers.
Fingers crossed that this will work out well.
By what Giannis wrote, and I believe him, I think this will be a different case. Thea's team will be kept and they will get less distracted by management and marketing and more focused on development. Besides that, some plugin developers (Like Tomasz for Sketchup) are mostly independent from Thea's main company. I don't exactly know how their contract stands, but I'd only be worried if Tomasz left the game... It doesn't seem like that.
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@pilou said:
Thea is not yet a mature program ?
I assume it is (I bought a license only a week ago so I don't really know) but my point is that it matured within a specific environment, keyed to the needs of a particular body of users. I think some of the unease about this acquisition is that Thea was acquired by a company that's not well known in this space so it's not obvious what this will mean going forward. When Autodesk bought Arnold there wasn't as much confusion because Arnold customers were often Max or Maya customers so the future implementation of the software wasn't in question. I can't say I've ever heard of Altair's suite of software so I have no idea what they do or what place Thea might occupy in their structure.
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After reading all of the comments in this thread, I downloaded the trial version because it looked like a pretty good piece of software and others on this forum have posted some good looking renders. I tried to render an animation created with Fredo's Animator plugin (beta). I have done this with other software but the Thea experience was not positive.
At this point I am assuming that I did something wrong since this was my first attempt. If you are a member of the Animator beta testing team, you can check out my post here to see my results and what happened. I welcome any feedback/comments anyone my have and hope that the problem is totally my fault.
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