We were informed of a post in another forum, presenting Thea IR in a rather unjustified way. Both that it is slow and it does not able to resolve certain effects (caustics). The test case is using the scene that comes with Thea, the glass+water illuminated by sun+sky.
Regarding IR being slow, we have a strong (opposite) feeling that Thea's IR is quite fast and it can perform efficiently even on old machines. Tests that we ran on relatively old dual core machines show to this direction.
Regarding resolving all kinds of lighting transfer, as you may know, Thea comes not only with one engine but with many. We kept this logic with IR as well, where default method is a biased one (not calculating caustics) but user can also switch to unbiased one. Using the glass+water scene, the full lighting transfer can be computed, by clicking on interactive render settings, selecting "Unbiased* (MC)" engine core, enabling Caustics and increasing Tracing Depth.
Here is the final result using IR unbiased engine:
Attachment:
File comment: Unbiased IR result of glass+water scene.
glass and water Interactive Render 800x600.png [ 445.27 KiB | Viewed 1408 times ]
Here is also a video showing Thea's IR with the glass+water scene:
http://www.thearender.com/resources/GlassOfWater_IR/index.htmlThe reason of this post, is just for reference for whoever comes across the related post on the other forum and nothing else.
best wishes
