I spend today looking into Thea renderer again after having read about it at Blendernation.
The render exporter still breaks but I assume that is more because of Blender 2.54 beta status.
However the importer of OBJ files works great and thus did I give it a test drive.
Thea looks like a very sold program. The interface is compact, easy to use.
The render features and material options seem not leave any wish unanswered.
The interactive rendering is pretty usable including a fast dof effect.
Since this software is not that expensive and comes with it own studio set up tool
I am interested in it. Since a long time I own VRay and with the current development
of Blender the exporters hardly work that often.
Does anybody use Thea professionally?
Could you provide them indepth experience about strength and weakness?
hey cekuhnen,
I have a friend who uses it for architectural work with sketchup, I will endeavour to ask him about his impressions on the software, but from what I’ve heard so far, he seems pretty happy about it…
Did I get it right that you have to purchase Thea AND the Blender exporter separately, paying two bills? I was looking at it just yesterday and this is what I understood.
Great interface for sure, and interactive render looks very useful for quickly tweaking scene lights and so on.
I just export as OBJ and import - thea has a good merge function and you can also move objects around
in thea. plus when you refresh a mesh, it keeps the position change you did to it in thea.
Thanks Claas, looks like it is definitely worth a try, while waiting for Render Branch merge.
I strongly prefer to work inside a single application, though, even with little loss of functionality. This export-import thing was not my cup of tea in the past, let’s see if Thea team did manage to make the workflow smoother.
I did some tests with the 2.5 exporter yesterday and I’m gonna do a few more tests today. I think I’ll probably end up buying it this evening. The quality seems pretty high and the settings very versatile. I have already bought Vray standalone a while ago but personally I am more used to the kind of settings in Thea and because it is proprietary, the integration seems to have been worked on more and is at a more advanced stage. These recent renders posted on evermotion really caught my eye http://www.evermotion.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=82599
It looks great. I was always a fan of the Kerkythea system, I just hated how it bombed out all the time on the special Blender version they created. If they had done a proper exporter that worked I’d probably be using it still.
I also remember a cool Kerkythea material setting called “bevel” which gives to the models a beveled edge appearance, without the need of adding actual geometry. XSI have this kind of trick, too.
Really useful to get good results with a lean mesh.
That was the good thing about the Kerkythea system, it had its own ‘studio space’ where you could set up lights and materials. So if (read as: ‘When’) the exporter bellied-up, you could import your models into Kerkythea and get the job done. Kerkythea was very fast and stood up under scenes that killed off Yafaray and Luxrender. It was just too much of a pain in the arse to trek stuff back and forth.
I ended up purchasing Thea yesterday, the interactive feature is amazing and worth the price alone, I’m going to make a little video over the weekend showing it in use. The quality of renders is very high, the unbiased renders are up there with Indigo etc, you can also choose biased rendering in the manner of Vray, Yafary etc. There is a handy time limit feature and the inbuilt materials are pretty useful and can be adapted to the users needs and saved. There’s a lot of camera and image processing options as well.
As Thea studio has a fair amount going on, it will probably take a little while to get used to especially if you haven’t tried unbiased renderers before, it took me a few hours playing around yesterday to get all the basics down and there are a few things I haven’t touched yet. I’ll maybe try and get some speed comparisons done as well but so far it’s lookin good!
Speed comparison would be interesting. I showed Thea to a designer I know in Germany
and the material system made him instantly do better renderings. Since he has 3 computers
the network render option also comes in very handy.
I get the feeling Thea is really an ideal product to be placed against software such has Bunkspeed Shot
or Keyshot.
I am not sure how far it is usable for rendering animation - I am quite convinced that actually
VRay or Yafaray there deliver more tools - in particular because Thea is a physical only render system
and meant for product shots.
mmmm- I was looking at Thea - mainly to improve and develop some animations. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get the plug-in working on OS-X and I can’t test it with bones etc and have just been loading up obj files.
So is thea not designed to create animations - was that an opinion or a fact? I’m loving the material set up and and keen to test it out more - any info on animation would be good. -
Thea does support animations. Google “Thea animations” to find some videos on Vimeo. The render times are pretty long, but the results are exquisite. I see it being used for relatively short product or architectural walkthroughs.
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