Dear Giannis,
Yes I'm proud to be a Thea user. Each parameter makes me glad and comforts my choice: renders quality, ergonomics, look, team engagement, population around, spirit in enhancements.

The only thing which makes me in a problematic mood is the deficiency of a good user guide!!
As I am learning rendering by myself, it is too much difficult to progress straight away and take even 20% of the advantages of Thea!
The number of things I have to gather on the net, with our without success, and afterward to adapt into Thea interface is too huge.
I would need a user guide as complete as possible, which remembers also the main generic knowledges (and problems)...
But I know that this requests a big big energy; an energy your team already spend to enhance the soft itself so!!
I try my best to learn. And I'm a bit confused to ask too many newbie questions on a specialists place...

Cheers,
Simon.

There are several newbies in this forum. So some of the questions you ask yourself and hesitate to post on the forum are probably questions some other users ask themselves too Don't hesitate to ask.
I agree with you : Thea is GREAT, but it lacks a newbie manual and tutorials to build upon ... and tutorials for more advanced users.

It's true and you are not the only one... Sometimes (actually most of the times), we are carried away and speak too much on the technical aspects of the software. Definitely our mistake. And definitely, we need to balance development with tutorials, especially now that we are going to have a release date.

best wishes

Merci naudofr (Arnaud je suppose) pour l'encouragement


Thanks Giannis to reply and to take care. Be sure I understand the priorities. I wait and stay up to date with the news.
Well, I think turning around rendering, texturing, modeling, post-processing, etc.. like I do, I feel I am not moving at all, but this is a necessary work, and will probably germinate one day!
The point is that rendering is a specialists affair and it is very difficult to find complete tuts like for example for Photoshop .. which fits pretty much to a larger population..

++simon

Hey Simon, as already said, don't hesitate to ask questions! I often see questions arise that then make me wonder the same thing. As much knowledge coming from asking questions often gives the person who answers knowledge as well, and there are many people on here you are quick to answer. Also remember that Thea is still in its beta phase and its difficult to write tutorials for a program this is still changing a lot.

Hi James,
So kind to you to invite me to ask freely!
The problem I encounter is that I bring knowledge small pieces by small pieces and I experiment some difficulty to assemble the puzzle.
Is there a well known book which teach rendering as an organized piece of knowledge ?


I'm absolutely aware of that. For example a main revolution as Interactive Render was not available with the version I had bought !!

Well, I don't want to bump too much this thread concerning Terminator Artifact Treatment.
I have missed to say to Giannis and the team: "Bravo! for this, bravo to be the first team to solve this problem - and thank you a lot"

Cheers, simon.

@ Giannis : Great to know that Thea 1.0 is coming closer and tutorials too
I understand, as a lot of users have already said, that in this Beta phase Thea team focus on development. When we will have theses tutorials, it will be great.

@simonlebon : De rien
I consider my Thea learning curve as a puzzle where I have to find the pieces to gather in the forum, books about optic, lighting, rendering ...etc, wikipedia... and sometimes it's hard to find the missing pieces and I can jam a long moment but other times some finding pieces bring other unexpected pieces ... and I progress greatly. Every learning curve requires an effort.

cheers,
Arnaud (you were right)

Some of them :
Lighting and rendering by Jeremy Birn
Advanced Global Illumination by Philip Dutre, Kavita Bala, Philippe Bekaert (it has good review but I haven't read it, so I can't tell you more)

I receive it in 4 or 5 days

Thanks Arnaud,
*s

PS: I keep the second one which promises to be very interesting "under my elbow"..

you welcome