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.

Hi all. Glad to read that Thea's causing so much agitation! There is some sort of saying that sais something like "it's no matter if it's good or bad, we just need people to be talking about us". Well, in this particular case, I believe good words are a lot more than "bad" words about Thea. About all suggestions posted here I think Thea's team will be delighted about having so much comments and suggestions. As a closed beta tester of the application (yes I am one of the lucky ones ) I may say that what impressed me most is having the main developer asking our questions and doubts in a few hours, sometimes minutes. That proved something - that finally people are understanding that having a community helping them with the development will actually make the applications better suited to the real needs. I just wished 20% of the companies out there were like Thea's team.
Well, now that the beta is open, I suggest you all keep trying. And Thea's made some huge leaps with testers opinions, so I believe it will continue that way, so keep on suggesting improvements.
Overall, at this point, I sincerely say that Thea has impressed me much (I was a Kerkythea fan previously, and I have also worked with vray, mentalray, indigo and maxwell). The features it has today (and will have) and - omg the introductory price (which I suggest you take a good look at) - just made it a must-have for anyone (fanatic like me) for communicating architecture and spaces.
Sorry for the long boring text, but these are all sincere words. Be well all, and see you soon.

First, thanks to the author for this great plugin! Unfortunately Im not getting it to work right with the latest sketchup release (SketchUp 7 (7.1.5803) and OSX.
The live update does not work, and only the 3x3 FFD works (with no live update).
My console reports this:

When creating the 3x3 FFD control points:
"WARNING: make_unique is a deprecated method of Sketchup:Group"

When creating the NxN FFD control points:
"WARNING: make_unique is a deprecated method of Sketchup:Group
Error: #<NoMethodError: undefined method *' for nil:NilClass> /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/SketchyFFD.rb:453:in calcBernstein'
/Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/SketchyFFD.rb:210:in initFFD' /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/SketchyFFD.rb:209:in upto'
/Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/SketchyFFD.rb:209:in initFFD' /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/SketchyFFD.rb:200:in each'
/Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/SketchyFFD.rb:200:in initFFD' /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/SketchyFFD.rb:151:in startFFD'
/Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/SketchyFFD.rb:20"

Hope to fix this soon... the plugin is a really must-have

The mystery behind the sparkle disappearing is nothing compared to the strange reflection appearing on the water surface...

Sounds creative

That is indeed the spirit. Help and be helped. Everyone wins.

Well, here is my tip (hope someone hasn't said this yet, if so... its never enough to repeat)
Since Sketchup works with front and back faces (a plane has both) be sure that front faces are always facing you and the camera. Having a mixture of front/back faces makes applying materials harder in Sketchup and a lot of other problems when, later on, you will export sketchup scenes to be rendered in an external renderer software.
By default, back faces display in a blue/gray shade which sometimes is confusing with the front faces (which display white). So, I always work with red back-faces: the switch can be done in the styles/edit panel of Sketchup.

Gaieus advice solves the problem.
But if you are looking for editing curved surfaces (eg. draw a rect. and push pull) don't miss this out:

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=11212

It is Fredo6's Tools on Surface plugin. IT WILL BE WORTH IT.

I use the flip along axes tool. (right click the object/group/component, then select flip along, then choose the axis). If the axis is not correct, be sure to first change your user coordinate system, matching you need (also using google default function, no ruby necessary).

TIG's script + purge model from model info (or purgeall.rb ruby) works great. Thank you all. From now on, no more materials than those strictly needed!