Our upcoming version v1.1 will have a killer feature: integration with Motiva's Colimo application. What does this mean? It means that it is now possible to edit the materials in real time as a post-process. In more detail:

1) Thea Render can calculate extra information needed for user selected materials during the course of a single render. The additional channels computed are exported as a single Colimo project with high quality of the original render being preserved.

2) Using Colimo, the color and texture of the pre-selected materials can be changed in real-time.  With web export, combinatorial variations can be generated automatically - check our online kitchen sample (375 variations from a single render).

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During the last weeks, we have worked on the core of the application and succeeded into achieving a remarkable speed boost that makes Thea up to 2 times faster! In more detail:

1) Render times are decreased between 25% and 50%. 2) Construction of the environment is now multi-threaded. 3) There is a reduced memory footprint - estimated between 10-20%. d) The improvement is even more pronounced for heavily instanced scenes - up to 5x!.

We are continuously working on various improvements and advances and we believe that the next public revision will be an important milestone.

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Luminance and illuminance properties of a scene are the two key factors in lighting design; they describe the energy arriving to our eyes and space correspondingly, but in the way we, humans, perceive and interpret lighting. These properties can now be computed out-of-the-box, in parallel with the rendering process. Besides the cool false-color rendering, user can select multiple regions of interest where he can analyze the extreme points and distribution of values. In addition, a full report can be easily generated, that can be viewed in any web browser.

With the addition of this feature, photometric analysis and reports, which are usually found in expensive applications, are now delivered with the fidelity and accuracy of Thea Render.

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The terminator artifact is one that can be seen at the limit of lighting for models of low-poly subdivision (it is more obvious in low-poly meshes although it can be seen on very detailed meshes when closing up). As far as we know, the majority of unbiased renderers suffers from this problem. In biased renderers, it is somewhat easier to fix the problem.

In Thea Render, we didn't want a solution that could alter/bias material appearance but instead we very carefully compensate for the energy loss due to the terminator artifact dark zones. Our solution produces smooth renders even for very low-poly models with the basic assumption that the subdivision is uniform (i.e. not abruptly changing).

We are actually very proud that we have this working out-of-the-box for all engines.

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