OK. That's excellent news! If you are able to pull off a great realtime engine that works with Thea materials and you give us systems to insert assets in it and produce VR, then that is great.
I've worked with Unreal, tried Enscape and I am now working with Twinmotion.
Lumion I didn't try but the finished images I've seen are great and the amount of assets is impressive. There's something fishy in it though, like you now got displaced materials but I don't know if you can only use ready made displaced materials. I'm fond of having many diverse and quality materials already made, but I want to be able to make my own too. I got the feeling I was going to try it when they got bevels, I have the feeling I'm going to try it now with displaced materials, but something is always holding me back and it's not only the price.
Enscape I've seen it in action and used it with a really bad model and the lighting was in fact good. I don't know why, but I don't like it though, maybe it's the muscled man in the icon, maybe is the icons in the output, or maybe only because it's rental.
I have used Unreal and it works nicely. There's some steep learning curve though, but Unreal Datasmith really made the job easier. I don't think the integration is great with Sketchup. It's an export thing. The amount of quality you can take from it is great if you invest a lot of time. You also don't get ready made assets and it's excessively game oriented. I absolutely adore Substance integration with it. Loved Unreal but had no time for it. It's a lot faster to get quality from Thea output, so I quit.
I have had good results with Twinmotion free. But feel that the lighting in Enscape and Lumion is better.
I will wait for new Twinmotion and decide:
- Lumion - Very steep price, but one time payment, network license and optional upgrade only. It's a complete and fast solution and seems it does everything we need though I have doubts about material customization.
- Twinmotion - Free for now, let's see the price in the future. It already yields good results if you can control it. A lot of bugs. Assets are stone age and sparse. UI isn't streamlined but I heard Lumion's worse. Seamless integration with Unreal seems in the pipes (this is truly a strong point) and it also will have RTX tech to push quality further.
I'm betting on Twinmotion for now. If it disappoints I might go for Lumion.
I got the quote for Altair Render and it's too steep priced for me because I don't see what I can get more than I have right now with T4SU that is worth all the euros you charge annually. Honestly, I find Lumion better value for the money though it is a lot more expensive. It has all to do with Realtime, Fast full rendering, a lot of assets, VR, animation and panorama.
Altair Render can't compete with that yet. I hope it will.
Altair Studio at 499 would be great if I needed another modeller OR if you had something that would replace Sketchup's Layout. You haven't got it yet nor the assets, nor the realtime really polished. If you had that I would definetelly consider using it. Right now it's too much money for a companion software.
I have also to think that I will need BIM in the future and Altair Studio has nothing to do with that yet.
I'm hoping Thea4SU realtime is coming in a near future, not in a distant one. That would definetely make me ignore all other renderers out there.
claudio wrote: ↑Mon Nov 04, 2019 9:40 pm
JQL wrote: ↑Mon Nov 04, 2019 3:13 am
I knew from previous testing that you had real-time rendering but I didn't think it was up there yet. Unreal engine is, lumion and enscape too, there is also unity. All of these already have great quality.
Do you have direct experience with those or are you just comparing demo images/videos?
I'm open to comparing scenes if you have some... And to work on the weak points to be the best.
I will finish a project in Sketchup and Twinmotion and share it with you after. Maybe that helps. I assembled it in a fast output with a speed I couldn't do with Thea. It produced not so bad output.
I'm now working on testing to what extents I could push the model in Twinmotion for higher quality and what kind of output I could produce with it.
The idea is to compare what compromises I can make in which situations. I know Thea will be there for highest standards, but I need something that can pull off competitions fast. That kind of job requires being able to easily place tons of assets, have fast render times and still get good output. It doesn't need highest standards but I don't want to loose too much of the quality I could pull from Thea either.
