Nice work! Thank you!

Congratulations!

@valerostudio said:

The best free engine is Kerkythea because it is truly open source and has no limitations. I would recommend playing with Maxwell if you don't need to render high resolution images. Having your engine stay withing SketchUp is very useful and is a time saver.

Have to correct the "open source" part. kerkythea is free, but no open source. But there are some open source renderers (or actually GPL), if really needed; Cycles (Blender), Lux render and Mitsuba are maybe best know. Kerkythea been proven to work, so it still maybe a fine option.

Just a heads up, "Surf with caution rating" on bootstrapcdn.com at http://www.avgthreatlabs.com/website-safety-reports/domain/bootstrapcdn.com

Have to ask again, is it really needed to use so much 3rd party scripts with sketchucation? The site is on the top5 tech site I do use, but I really wish that site itself where build so that there are less options for cross-site scripting attacks.

About the voting on some mealier post. I don't think this is a matter of voting (For website is a question how site owner considers security to be important with relations to it's customers), as it's so easy to cast a vote by just based on a feeling. But like I in opening post warned, there been security issues with bootstrapcdn.com and now month later the site is rated "Surf with caution rating". For me it stays blocked by no script...

There also 3rd party scripts from metacdn.com that luckily seems to have a better record with safety, but blocking those scripts will break forum... so I am now in a situation, where I need to consider if sketchucation is more important for me than security I tend to keep when surfing the web. No judgement yet... but for last months track is not good in that are of the site.

@gilles said:

May I ask you an example off good settings for a similar result?

I would appreciate .

There are some material packs you might look
http://www.kerkythea.net/cms/resources/materials/Metals_Ashikhmin_MLT.mat.zip <- need to use MLT with this
http://www.kerkythea.net/cms/resources/materials/Metals%20and%20Car%20Paints.mat.zip

Thea Render v1.3.02 Revision 1026 released with some feature updates for Presto engine; invisible emitters, as well as invisible shadow-casting models or visible no-shadow models are now working. Naturally there some bug fixes.
You can find release topic at http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=61%26amp;t=13933 (and get update via forum if you are in a hurry). The update will be available via Thea's build in-app update later when tested a bit more.

@charly2008 said:

Hi,

Spoke too soon! in some models, the error message appears again. I've googled already hundreds of pages. It seems that hundreds of thousands of users have the same problem . By searching the Nvidia Forum I found nothing. With Nvidia, the problem seems to be unknown. It can not be that no one can solve this problem!

Charly

Adjusting graphics driver Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR) may help. It could be that for some reason CUDA kernel runs longer than default delay allows.
http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=98519#p98519

Congratulations!

@gilles said:

Morning pleasure.

Great... that made me dust the old espresso machine and now I again addicted.

@dave r said:

thanks for the suggestion. I'll see if I can sort that out. I used KT for these.

There is no proper AO in KT, so float or modify mesh to get some recess around the feet. If you used KT biased engine, missing contact shadows is just a feature... for example Thea has different approach in it's biased engine (Field Mapping instead of Photon Mapping) and it can produce good contact shadows ( +there is AO feature if needed). With KT, unbiased engines should produce better contact shadows, but still... floating models a bit will help.

@dave r said:

Any suggestions from the rendering gurus on how to give the stools the appearance of weight. It looks like they are floating on the carpet when they should be sunken in. Maybe I could make a mesh and depressions under the feet with sandbox tools? Any other suggestions?

Not sure what renderer you used, but if you don't want to go and remodel the carper, you could try to add some AO effect. Also like said, you could try to float chairs a bit...

@solo said:

@bryan k said:

Autocad now has a free product that will do this called 123D Catch.

Going to put a lot of 3D artists out business.

I do not believe it can scan something that has not yet been designed, 3D artists have a bright future.

Well... maybe in some day http://sciencenordic.com/your-smartphone-can-scan-your-brain. A tin foil hat should fix that issue.

@bryan k said:

Autocad now has a free product that will do this called 123D Catch.

Going to put a lot of 3D artists out business.

Well... you probably missed the point, 123D Catch (or at least last time I tried it) requires images to be send to a server for 3D model calculations, this uses only smartphone to do the trick.

It was not about how 3D scanning puts someone out of business.

@solo said:

@unknownuser said:

for IR rendering it will use one dedicated to it

How does one decide this, through the Nvidia panel or Thea studio? what about in the Thea4SU plugin?

From nvidia control panel you can just enable/disable cuda for certain program/globally.
Thea and Thea4SU has devices panel that can be used to set priority, interactive and so... that is the place where you select what is interactive GPU.

@liam887 said:

For example two GTX 680's in SLI will out perform the Titan as a whole but i dont know if Thea supports that? Pete?

Running two cards will help, but forget connecting those to SLI, it wont help or actually may cause issues, as SLI is only for "game" graphics... it does not work with CUDA. Sure Thea can use both (darkroom), but for IR rendering it will use one dedicated to it and the other one will be used for running display, so you get good response when working with UI.

Actually now I did remember... maybe someone just needs to do a commercial version of this DYI Thunderbolt external NVidia graphics and one can use they mac book air for cuda rendering and a new mac pro too in a nice pack.

@jeff hammond said:

anyway, i just threw the openCL thing out there since the new mac pros are about to be released and they have two amd gpus on there.. with no cuda options.

Indeed... it's just sad... maybe AMD did give Apple a deal that was too good to be ignored. But I still hope... for a nvidia flavor. After all it's just some custom form factor daughter cards. Some user feedback may be required too

Just think the toys kids have now, example Mindstorms EV3...
http://www.lego.com/en-us/mindstorms/?domainredir=mindstorms.lego.com
...what is they future realm in 30-40 years (if Skynet does not exist).

jeff, I have no way to promise or even suggest that OpenCL version will come in some point. But in earlier development phase giannis told that he will keep the option open and will follow how OpenCL will mature. If you look these steps that Presto engine has taken, first CUDA in GPU, then enabling it to run in CPU (with Embree)... I only can say that giannis will not leave rocks turned, if he founds a feasible way.

dtr, be free to join in Thea discussion forum for further questions. At the moment, released v1.3 is available for customers. r1.2 is available for testing in demo mode. But one can assume that (like with v1.2) demo will arrive in some point.