Like promised... and more join to announsement topic at Thea Render forums.

@unknownuser said:

Dear friends,

in the last months, we have made a series of advances (followed with related tech announcements) which we are happy now to make them available in our new milestone edition v1.3! The new edition, codename "Presto Square", brings Thea Render one step closer to perfection! We have enjoyed working on it very much and we are really proud of the results.

If you simply cannot wait anymore, you can either take a closer look at our new edition special webpage, or head to the download thread in the forum. As always, this is a free-of-charge update for our licensed users.

This is one of the big moments for us, for various reasons; the new edition comes with lots of new and impressive features, we managed to deliver it in time and we are very happy about it! And here is the proof: we are launching a promotional offer for new users that can get the new version in a discounted price (195 euros for Thea Render, 245 for 3dsMax bundle, 195 for Blender bundle and 245 for SketchUp bundle)*.

To celebrate our new edition we had another idea. Anyone that will buy a Thea Render (commercial) license**, either standalone or within a bundle, will be automatically enter our 1.3 edition prize draw: one iPad Air ($729) and a Wacom Pro Tablet ($499) for the lucky winners of our contest! You can find more info in this page.

Best wishes

• For those that have purchased in the last ten days (8th-17th December), they will be refunded as if they were buying with the full promotional discount. For those that purchased before but inside December (1st-7th) they will be refunded as if they were buying with the half promotional discount.
  ** The purchase must be made directly from our e-shop.

I like the direction on the style is going, but some odd internal refractions are visible, maybe interior is solid glass? Use "thin glass" with windows? Maybe a bit too much AO shadows below it or is it just how model is illuminated...

With upcoming release v.1.3 Presto engine will use both GPU and CPU...

@unknownuser said:

Dear friends,

a lot of you have already guessed what our next tech announcement will be and indeed it is about Presto running on both GPU and CPU. This announcement is probably among the most important ones in Thea Render tech achievements. Unifying GPU and CPU under the same (render) framework is not an easy job. With Thea Presto being written from scratch, we had the ambition, right from the beginning, to harvest all the computer power that is available.

For coding Presto on the CPU, we didn't want just a "port" of the code from Nvidia CUDA architecture to x86/CPU architecture. We wanted to squeeze the CPUs to the max and see a real performance comparison between GPUs and CPUs. For this, we decided to adapt Intel's Embree library. What does this mean? with every GPU and CPU core running Presto, it means fast, very fast, rendering. And this fast rendering is coupled with Thea's material/light system. All in all, pure quality in the shortest render times!

What is also quite interesting is the performance comparison between GPUs and CPUs. We have modeled four scenes specifically for this purpose and ran the benchmarks on various machines (our own plus beta tester machines). It is very nice to see that CPUs stay up to their task and bring a significant speed boost. The actual relative performance between GPUs and CPUs depends heavily on the system and scene type.

Actually, to our knowledge, Thea Presto is a unique engine that makes it possible to compare GPUs and CPUs under the same render framework with performance maxed out for both architectures, in a systematic way*. You are welcome to download the detailed benchmark pdf document attached with this post.

Best wishes

• Disclaimer: the comparison between the GPUs and CPUs is only made within Thea Presto framework and does not imply any kind of general performance superiority of a specific processor/architecture.

More benchmarks and discussion at related topic http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17%26amp;t=13779

@carloh said:

Thank you all for your tips...i made the adjustments you suggested and i guess this will be my final entry in this competition

Much improved!

Looks similar to http://www.moviepilot.de/files/images/0486/8182/Morgan_Freeman.jpg

Call me paranoid... but I prefer not to use this kind of 3rd party loading. I'd never had any serious slow down issues with sketchucation. Anyhow, you are informed about the risk.

Frederik, it's link to postmortem of the exploit, so I have to assume some antivir software may go ballistic. I'll add a warning.

I'd try to reinstall Thea if you have not done so. Are you using latest RV
http://www.thearender.com/cms/index.php/downloads/thea-render.html remember also get latest presto GPU (if you have nvidia GPU) http://www.thearender.com/cms/index.php/downloads/presto-gpu.html

Is using bootstrapcdn really needed? Just a reminder what may happen... this kind of solutions do open risk for a injection attack.

Postmortem of the exploit can be found in following. Warning some antivir software may go ballistic.

https://github.com/MaxCDN/bootstrap-cdn/issues/128
http://blog.maxcdn.com/bootstrapcdn-security-post-mortem/

Recent research results turning a normal smartphone into a mobile 3D scanner... no calculation on a server needed!
http://cvg.ethz.ch/mobile/

@kaliphegtu said:

why not replace photo match by video match !!
Ex:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vda2RAEuW_g

+1

A little heads up of soon to be released Thea Presto 1.3...

@unknownuser said:

Dear friends,

here it is, a feature asked for long time now, finally we have it working with all engines. It is about camera Z Clipping; near and far planes that cut the space giving us the possibility to "look inside" the models. We show below a comparison render to understand better how it can be used.


This feature was quite straightforward to implement, this is why we were wondering how we missed adding it in the first place!

Best wishes

PS. One last tech announcement pending.

You can follow Thea Render Technology Preview announsements at the related forum http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=17

Section planes we know from SU are still a pending feature, but they are on a wish list.

@imabzeous said:

@pixero said:

Here's a link to some tutorials to get you started:
http://www.thearender.com/cms/index.php/resources/tutorials/overview-tutorials.html

thank you.. but the thing i dont understand is all the rendering setttings tr1 2 and options.. its very different from vray the approach and all.. i understand its material system but the rendering options/camera etc etc

TR1/TR2 are unbiased render cores, cores with BSD are biased cores (similar to vray). You can find biased settings settings marked with blue text, you cannot use those with unbiased TR1/TR2. All explained in manual, if you have read it.

There are basic tutorials available at http://www.thearender.com/cms/index.php/resources/tutorials.html Take a look also on additional tutorials for 1.2 after you have read/watched older tutorials.

If you have questions about usage, dont hesitate to use Thea Render forums to ask questions http://www.thearender.com/forum/

@xonpt said:

...
and no pool is filled millimetrically up to the top like that
...

Sure pools can be "fully filled", but it requires a bit different structure that appears used now in the model. Just look on some perimeter overflow pools...

Full instancing support for Presto 1.3

@unknownuser said:

Dear friends,

we are happy to say here that we have now full instancing support for Presto. In fact, we are very proud of all the small and big memory improvements that opened the way to instancing support on the GPU side! I admit that this was one of the most asked features once Presto v1.2 was out and even a feature that some could not live without.

It is time that you get some beautiful renders made with Presto, with all the geometric complexity you want!
And we have already prepared some nice renders to showcase this new feature.

...

Find out more at the related topic at Thea Render Technology Preview forum.

@krisidious said:

a lot of autocad drawings I import are just slightly off at intersection close zoom. Whatsmore it's so small that you have to zoom way in just to see it.

I have seen those... a lot.

Have a great day!

Impressive work so far!

Improved Physical Sky Model with Thea Presto 1.3

@unknownuser said:

Dear friends,

we have made an improvement for all render engines, related to the physical sky. Thea's sky in v1.3 is much more accurate for spectral rendering and yields much better results in higher values of turbidity (which are usually wanted to give special mood to a render). The parameters for the new physical sky model are basically the same with similar influence on the image but more accurate response.

...

More examples at the related topic http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=13622

Interesting!

@bob james said:

@solo said:

it is faster than Win 7

What do you base that on, Pete? I have it on my laptop and really don't like the interface and have a program loaded to avoid it as much as possible.
However, if it would help with SU/Thea......

It's said to handle multithread programs better... so it possible will help a bit with Thea. Sorry, no actual comparisons, still using Win7 (and probably will for a while). No idea if it helps with SU (most likely not, but I happy to be proven wrong ).