Thea for Rhino takes full advantage of Thea Render functionality to create high-quality photorealistic renders within Robert McNeel & Associates Rhinoceros® 6 / 7 / 8. With advanced features such as interactive render, true physically-based materials, innovative material layering, IES & HDRI light support along with a versatile rendering system comprised of unbiased and GPU engines, rendering within Rhino has become really powerful.
Key features
Viewport interactive rendering
Thea for Rhino can run interactively in both Rhino’s viewport and the Thea rendering window. Select the desired viewport and simply let Thea Render give you an immediate visualization of your scene. With the addition of the NVIDIA and Intel AI denoisers, it is also possible to make use of denoising while in interactive mode.
Adaptive tracing
Adaptive tracing is a technique that solves difficult lighting scenarios, such as caustics from point lights, sun pool caustics and diffuse interreflections. This results in images with a higher dynamic range and lighting effects.
Powerful material editor
The advanced Thea material editor brings all the advanced and unique features of Thea materials. The user interface has been designed to the creation of complex materials either using presets or the layer-based editor.
Content Browser
Browse Thea materials & models from a unified window. With the online repository integrated in the materials tab, you get access to thousands of materials ready to download. The models tab contains all the stored Thea models with the option to import them as proxies in Rhino without overloading Rhino’s viewport.
AI denoising
Thea for Rhino supports both NVIDIA and Intel ΑΙ denoisers offering GPU and CPU accelerated denoising for both interactive and production renderings. They dramatically reduce the render time, creating high-quality and noise-free images.
Rhino animation support
Thea for Rhino supports the rendering of Rhino animation types such as: One-day sun study, Fly-through, path animation and turntable. It is possible to render the whole animation or select a specific frame range.
More features
Relight editor
Create infinite images from a single render. Every light in the scene can be modified (intensity, color and status) and create different lighting setups in post production.
Material collections
Download and install premium material libraries such as: jewelry metals, plastic surface finish and car paints.
Rhino materials
Thea for Rhino supports native Rhino materials and converts them on render time.
Back face material
The back face of any surface can have a different material and this makes it now possible to create advanced materials like labels, sheets of papers and tree leaves.
Grasshopper®
Thea for Rhino will render Grasshopper geometry while in interactive mode allowing you to see the result in photo realistic quality while working.
Resume/Merge render
Resume rendering is available to the user when more samples are needed or the rendering needs to be completed at a different time.
Clipping planes
Thea for Rhino provides support for Rhino’s clipping planes. Clipping planes allow you to cut through geometry while maintaining the same interior lighting regardless of the clipped geometry.
Batch rendering
Bring all the Named Views straight into the Thea rendering window and render them one after the other. Also, custom properties can be defined per Named View.
Spectral renderer | Resource manager | Console & network log | Geometry subdivision on render time | Lock to viewport | Custom light evaluation | Out-of-core rendering
Learning course
Getting started with Thea for Rhino
Part One: Introduction
In the first part of the course we will be learning about the user interface and the Thea Render workflow.
Part Two: Exterior
In the second part of the course we will be rendering an exterior scene and learn about: Materials, content browser, environment, tonemapping & exposure, denoising, beveled edges, clay render and production rendering.
Part One: Interior
In the third and last part of the course we will be rendering an interior scene and learning about: Exposure, using relight, depth of field and finally batch rendering.
Download Rhino Scene
You can follow up with the course by downloading the scene from here.
Rhinoceros® is a registered trademark of Robert McNeel & Associates.
System Requirements
Windows
Windows 8.1 / 10 64-bit, Intel SSE3 CPU (or compatible)
Presto GPU
Nvidia CUDA Graphics Card (Compute Capability 3.x / 5.x / 6.x / 7.x / 8.0 / 8.6 ) with latest graphics driver or
AMD Graphics Card (Beta support for selected GPUs) with latest OpenCL and graphics drivers
Note: for OpenCL rendering, render-on-the-fly displacement is supported only for UV bitmap textures
Nvidia OptiX Denoiser
Nvidia 5.0 minimum compute capability required for Nvidia OptiX denoising in interactive rendering
Nvidia 3.0 minimum compute capability card required for Nvidia OptiX denoising in production rendering.
Intel Open Image Denoiser
Intel SSE4.1 CPU (or compatible) required for Intel Open Image Denoiser.
Compatible with Rhino 6.33 and 7.17 and later, 8.