Meanwhile, Grzegorz is improving the integration of Thea on Blender. While true integration is not possible (yet), the workflow is being improved with rendering being pulled inside Blender and Thea running in the background.

Check out the video on youtube or from below:


Best wishes

Note: you can check also the original thread with the first teaser.

Nice ! Hope those integrations (SU and Blender) will be available shortly !! Thanks for the info !!

Very impatient !

That's nice news. Grzegorz make a good job. I'd like to thank and encourage him.

I'd like to keep using Thea, and I know that Thea is, currently, much more sophisticated than Cycles, but Cycles is so damn fast with GPU rendering on my new video card that I have a hard time using Thea. You guys really should have focused on Cuda rendering like everyone else and got something out there already. The train is leaving the station guys!

Everyone using Thea should be able to benefit from GPUrendering,....not only the nvidia user! we need OpenCL...
I prefer to work with an accurate renderer, rather than with immature software.


So THEA take your time and give us a masterpiece of a rendering engine

I have to agree with CADharsis on this. Cycles is not production ready even if it is a wonderful addition to Blender. And to be honest I love the simplicity of the material editor in Thea, because the node sistem in Cycles is very powerful but it can become overpowering for a simple artist.
One thing I notice with using GPU with Cycles is that I can´t continue to work with my computer. The GPU is used to draw the screen and my video card is not very good, so my refresh rate on the screen is very bad. The solution is to bought a second GPU only for render, and keep this one for the display.
So, I'm not really sold on GPU.
I hope that when GPU arrives to Thea it will be a solid addition to a already stable platform.

I am sure that Thea GPU will pay off for your patience

But I have to say that our worries are not related to Cycles or not (which looks quite nice), but rather the way Blender is designed with respect to proprietary add ons.

Best wishes

In fact it's not problem of addon itself but any binary integration with proprietary software. So there is no way of making full integration with proprietary rendering engine where you have to exchange binary data or use proprietary libraries.
And this is not really Blender's limitation itself but GPL one.
The only thing I can do is to save/read xml or image files. This is serious limitation, but as you can see in this latest teaser it's still possible do do something usable:

You are right, it's not really something special with Blender, but rather the GPL license.

Best wishes.