I'll ask if giannis can provide a alternative download side until kerkythea.net is fixed. Unfortunatelly kerkythea.net outage did happen in a particular nasty time (as there is a critical work with Thea Render v.1.2 release going on).

Did you remember to use ##current view## camera? A quick tutorial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxUMMdSJTgs (note also uses advanced settings for unbiased render, but you can use your own settings).

I think Adobe misuses "cloud computing" by naming this software renting model to xxx Cloud. This is pretty much just a software rental model and more advanced DRM. It's too early to know if this will actually stop piracy, as it's fully depended how Creative Cloud license verification does work. For example MS KMS Activation was hacked and so where other server based activations too. So far Adobe does not have any particular merits on protecting they software against piracy (maybe with a good reason ).

Perhaps we will see some new companies that now do dare to jump on the game

Don't see this as a particular surprise after they radically changed Educational institute CPL (Concurrent Use) licensing last summer. For a larger organization (like the university for I do work) that already was rather bad news and triggered immedially a Corel campus lisence acquisition
Quess I'll be using the old CS for now on, but for someone who dayly use photoshop this is probably not a issue... no real alternatives, unfortunatelly.

As we are getting nearer to Thea Edition v1.2 release day, I'd like to share you a preview of new technology used in it.

Field Mapping - A New Approach for Adaptive BSD

Field mapping is a new proprietary technique that evaluates consistently the lighting than cannot be reached easily by Final Gathering. It is something that we invested most of the time in the passed months and have brought it from a simple idea to life. Combined with an improved, adaptive, Final Gathering, the whole evaluation becomes robust even for the most difficult cases.

We can showcase Field Mapping with the scene below; it is a relatively simple scene for testing, yet difficult due to the covered area emitter. The result with traditional Final Fathering even when coupled with Photon Mapping is quite noisy, resulting in blotches in the final render. With Field Mapping evaluation becomes easy and it brings the expected high quality result without any troubles. If you want to test the scene with another renderer and find out more about upcoming features and render samples, please visit at the related technology preview topic.

Perhaps something like EnergyPlus is usable?
http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/energyplus/

@tinanne said:

Great work! The only think I noticed was that the reflection from the light is on top of the couch. It would not show with the lights behind it.

You mean lens glare? It's a effect generated by the camera (or eye). If you have a high enough contras between the light source and it's surrounding, then glare is seen and it bleeds over everything that's between the camera (or eye) and the light source. But in this case the glare is a bit too strong, room is well lit and as the candle is relatively dim, it would probably not generate glare in real life (even as it can be pushed to be seen in the darkroom). Some artistic freedom is obviously used
Anyhow nice work. It's always interesting to see the studio setup too.

Another stunning plugin! Thanks, Fredo.

Nice work!

@pbacot said:

I'm afraid that link is not helpful. Although I am a Thea member. It just logged me in to the forum index.

For me it seems to work ok, but you need to be logged in.

@mr. bill said:

From what I can gather SU is only capable of running on 1 core (despite the fact that many are available). My questions is if it is possible to set up my computer to dedicate 1 core just to SU. Would this gain me anything? Or is this even possible? Like I said, Noob Question.

Probably you will not gain anything, but you can change affinity
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/window-on-windows/change-the-processor-affinity-setting-in-windows-7-to-gain-a-performance-edge/5322

This has a great potential.

Great idea! Will there be some sort of update tracker or auto-updater?

@tridem said:

though, your map seems wrong since reliefs should correspond to white areas. Note that the material preview has a bug and works on the contrary way

I believe tridem is right. You need to invert colors of the bump map.

For interior (and why not exterior renders) you really should try different CRF profiles (http://www.thearender.com/resources/PDF_Tutorials/TheaDarkroomTutorial.pdf) as by default Thea produces quite neutral image (that's intentional so that people have more room for post processing).

Site is ok now.

Direct address into forum is http://www.kerkythea.net/forum/ and does work fine
At the moment the website itself cannot be accessed, we suspect that it's something to do with the service provider.

GTX Titan is quite nice GPU card

Congratulations, Chris! Some great news indeed.

@rich o brien said:

The result is perfect but my understanding of fresnel was for fabrics. This is where my confusion begins.

Custom fresnel has other uses too, for example it can be used to create a car-paint that changes the color based on viewing angle... it's not only the reflectance color tham can be changed, but curve itself can be modified (there some preset when you right click on custom curve area, when it's enabled)

I think massimo got a novel idea to use it with these finger prints.