Altair Inspire Render and Studio version 2019.3 is now available

[claudio]

I don't have specific scenes, but since you talked about what you can do, I thought you did.

I thought to give you the opportunity to see a test with a scene that you considered meaningful.
But that's ok, we have scenes....

[youyou40]

[DavePSB]

you kill the archviz rendering studio and give us something that has a lot more bugs and made for engineers and product shots...

... and for those with massive corporate budgets!

[d4m4rk]

We have an "Instance Painter" tool for now.
In the "Full" version, Inspire Studio there are a huge number of modeling tools that can be used to create landscape and other stuff. The price is not much higher.

But I see a little misunderstanding here. See my answer to MrWip later...

Thanks for an answer. At first do You have any raw render(s) to show us with average/massive grassland/wild grass area or forest scene to get an idea of capabilities of "Instance painter" tool or similar?

Cheers,
Mark

[claudio]

Claudio,

I think we’re facing here a classical “internet forums” problems. We’ve already all have this conversation previously but are still stuck in a frustrating mutual incomprehension…

I agree, there is a misunderstanding.
I see you were expecting a "staging application", on par with other products like that, such as those you mentioned: Twinmotion, Lumion, Enscape, etc.
That was not TheaStudio and is not Inspire Render right now. More on this later.

Just to put everything in the right perspective, let me just add that Lumion is priced much higher than Inspire Render and Enscape is monthly subscription too (and frankly this is where all the market is at present).

But let's stay focused on Inspire Render, I do not want at all to hide behind someone else's defects.

Altair is a company with many products and it is just natural that we want to be able to support every market at our hands. Product design is a big market for us, as it is engineering. It would not be clever to just forget those.

Architectural is a growing market for us, and we definitively want to be present too.
In fact we are, the SketchUp plugin grew considerably in features and capabilities. You are able now to do a lot more within the plugin's UI, without the need to use TheaStudio at all.
All the material creation and library, for example. It's all inside the plugin now, no need to switch back a forth an external TheaStudio.
Also the rendering is handled by the plugin directly. This was a team effort to off-load some pressure from TheaStudio/Inspire Render.
Many customers are doing just fine with that, and more is coming in the next version to be able to do even more "staging" within SketchUp.

Again, this doesn't mean Inspire Render will stay as it is, we keep working on it, we keep adding things, we keep improving it.
Of course it cannot go from zero to full staging/realtime/etc. in one step.

It's not what you though it would be? I can accept that.
It's not what you currently need? I can understand that.
Did we kill you beloved TheaStudio? No, that's not true. We're changing it. It's not there yet, it will be.

Thanks,
-Claudio

[3DCGdesign]

I'm admittedly selfish in my thinking, my apologies to the community at large (or what's left of it, here)...

Claudio - specifically I need to know if Thea for SketchUp will remain a focus of development or be abandware? I honestly think with only a few typical little quirks all software inevitably contains that Thea4SU is an excellent program for my needs (archviz and product shots) as it stands today.

I'm afraid if there is an "Inspire4SU" that it will also mess up all the great things going on in Thea4SU.

[mrwip]

Claudio,

Thanks for the time your taking to respond to this.

I disagree on the "staging" application. Thea Studio was, back in the days, announced to be just that. The team release several libraries (both objects and materials), there were plans to introduce some kind of ecosystem (I guess a sky, maybe ocean system) in a future. It was possible to place lights, library objects, interactively. Even the proxy tool your talking about was, in a way, present, with the instancing tool bar, even more feature rich than the one you actually propose in Inspire !!

For the rest, It's true that Lumion is far more expensive, but when you look at the price of libraries, the investment is way less consequent. I know what I'm talking about, it's been years that I invest a lot of time and money creating libraries on my own for Thea. Enscape is a for rent, true, and it's an issue, but right now I have no idea about the price of Inspire render. You could not find it anywhere, and I always find really suspicious products that does not display their price honestly up front. If someone knows how much it costs, it will be interesting to let it know.

Beside, you forget other tools, that come cheap : Twinmotion (free for previous owner of the free demo or somewhere between 300 and 500 euros) and D5 is still free (and will be around 400 euros afterward if I'm not mistaken). So the price argument does not stand that much.

Finally, it's true that the plugin greatly evolves in the recent years, and that's why we have this conversation. If it wasn't for the quality of this plugin, I guess that a lot of users will be gone by now. But (and maybe I'm wrong because V3 may offer that), there are still points that could not be done easily in the plugin :
- Huge scene merging, to enable the user to render large scale projects.
- Good and friendly proxy creation and edition tool (we still rely on v1.5 studio for that as everything is not possible to do in Thea4Su)
- Advanced animation tools (smooth camera path and so on)

By the way, I've opened an other thread here https://www.thearender.com/forum/viewto ... 65#p190765 to make a more precise review on Inspire

[claudio]

Claudio - specifically I need to know if Thea for SketchUp will remain a focus of development or be abandware?

Thea for SketchUp is alive and kicking and Tomasz is adding features and improvements like nobody else in the group

[dbalex]

Nice to hear this, we all know how much Tomasz is dedicated to his work

Can you confirm thea for c4d is also allive and kicking? I'm willing to learn and buy that plugin but don't want to spend hours/weeks learning and adapting to a new workflow to find out a couple of months later that you've decided to stop supporting this software.

[stu.dio]

Can you confirm thea for c4d is also allive and kicking?

+1 - still using and loving it but its been very quiet, with the likes of Unreal/TwinMotion and Lumion coming up strong I don't wont it to get left behind (and myself for that matter)