Thea Render Revision 472

[Frankych]

Hi Ioannis,
you'll never cease to surprise us, do you ever sleep?

Well done on the ies preview!!

Cheers
Francois

[naudofr]

Thanks Giannis and Thea team for the great work you do. The results are here !

[Frankych]

Hi Ioannis,
sorry to add to your workload, but I've had problems since rev470 with a scene that used to render fine in rev465, but refuses to render in rev470-472.
The scene will render in BSD mode, but doesn't render in TR1 unless I reduce the render resolution.
The original resolution was 3620x2450.
I wonder if rev470-472 are more memory hungry, or if there are some memory leaks along the process.
Here's a copy of the console log:

Using stored material editor scene "direct/direct"
Using stored material editor scene "direct/direct"
Opening file
Warning: Unknown object "Null Medium" of type "Medium"
Finished in 65 seconds!
GenerateSun: Position [-0.0599772 -0.994208 -0.0891833 0 0.554823 -0.107475 0.824997 0 -0.829803 0 0.558056 0]
Building Environment...Warning: activating instancing mode for saving memory.
Building environment finished in 3 seconds
Total Ray Tests : 0, Intersections found : 0
Error: Can not initialize environment from scene.
Warning: Environment not properly initialized.
Finished in 3 seconds!
Building Environment...Warning: activating instancing mode for saving memory.
done
Nodes: 5304145, Leaves: 2652079, Cache Level: Normal
Polys: 17009474, Objects: 14623, Parametric: 0
Moving: 0, Displaced: 0, Clipped: 430
Instances: 14433, Portals: 1
Building environment finished in 26 seconds
Error: Failed in allocating image (not enough available memory).
Total Ray Tests : 60028, Intersections found : 14575
Finished in 27 seconds!


OsX 10.6.6, MacPro 8cores@2.8Ghz, 22Gb Ram, Radeon 5770.

Cheers
Francois

[ThomasHelzle]

Wow - that's pretty cool!

The IES feature brings up something that I wondered about since I started to use Thea: Is there a way to (re-)render material library previews without loading the material and then overwrite the old material with the new one or drag the new one into the same folder, rename it and delete the old material?

Hm - that sounds convoluted - I try again:
I downloaded many great materials from the forums (a big thanks goes to all the contributors ), but most of the time I would love to have the previews in higher quality to better see how they look (I use a setting of 25 to 35 in the Material lab Room Options). So I would love to select a folder and tell Thea to re-render the previews with a given quality setting.
The new bump also is a good example where this would be good to have.

With IES lights the situation is different but similar, since no material exists yet:
I have folders with thousands of IES profiles, it would be very cool to have the process of creating the presets/previews automated.
Right now I use the free IESviewer (http://www.photometricviewer.com/1_4_Download.html)
to preview and select the lights (I use them for artistic reasons more than for accuracy), but having a preview directly in Thea would be very nice!

Or can this be automated via scripting?

Surely not the most pressing feature before the release though

Cheers,

Thomas

[Pinko]

Tnx for 472
ciao ciao
Luca.

[giannis]

Hi Ioannis,
sorry to add to your workload, but I've had problems since rev470 with a scene that used to render fine in rev465, but refuses to render in rev470-472.
The scene will render in BSD mode, but doesn't render in TR1 unless I reduce the render resolution.
The original resolution was 3620x2450.
I wonder if rev470-472 are more memory hungry, or if there are some memory leaks along the process.

No, they are not more memory hungry; obviously with every small addition, more memory is needed but nothing has changed in the two most memory demanding things in Thea (the environment and image). Since the version is 32-bit on Mac, it may be possible that the memory was just marginally enough for RV465 and this is now failing for newer revision. What if you change resolution to 3.5K x 2K, does it work?

In order to make it possible for TR1/TR2 here, there are two ways to go... not perfect but rather workarounds. Either split the image in 2 or 4 parts and render them with region rendering or use None in supersampling.

best wishes

Edit: there is another option to make it possible but this depends... If you open Thea with the darkroom switch (this requires command line), then you won't lose memory resources on the scene view and OpenGL viewport. So, please try this first: open a shell, go to Applications folder and type: "open -a Thea.app --args -darkroom" (on Windows there is a link on the Start menu for this), open the scene and start rendering.

[giannis]

The IES feature brings up something that I wondered about since I started to use Thea: Is there a way to (re-)render material library previews without loading the material and then overwrite the old material with the new one or drag the new one into the same folder, rename it and delete the old material?

Hm - that sounds convoluted - I try again:
I downloaded many great materials from the forums (a big thanks goes to all the contributors ), but most of the time I would love to have the previews in higher quality to better see how they look (I use a setting of 25 to 35 in the Material lab Room Options). So I would love to select a folder and tell Thea to re-render the previews with a given quality setting.
The new bump also is a good example where this would be good to have.

With IES lights the situation is different but similar, since no material exists yet:
I have folders with thousands of IES profiles, it would be very cool to have the process of creating the presets/previews automated.
Right now I use the free IESviewer (http://www.photometricviewer.com/1_4_Download.html)
to preview and select the lights (I use them for artistic reasons more than for accuracy), but having a preview directly in Thea would be very nice!

Or can this be automated via scripting?

I love this idea of easy re-rendering the previews!

It's basically like the Build All Previews feature but for the materials on disc (and not the scene).
Ideally, this could descend also the folder structure to apply it recursively. And, it is something
that we also would like to have for the materials that ship with Thea (even for just testing
purposes).

So, great idea! The only problem with the IES files is that they are not complete thea materials,
they are just ascii files, so the previews cannot be embedded. But we can work this out without
too much effort.

best wishes

[ThomasHelzle]

I love this idea of easy re-rendering the previews!

Cool, I love that you love the idea!
And even cooler if you think it's not too much effort to be actually possible

The new IES features are really great, but I think I'm missing something:
In your screenshots and when I tried it out myself, I found that like you say, the IES isn't really a material. So it seems that if I drag an IES in the material Lab with an IES light selected, the IES is actually added to the last material active, shown by the small lamp symbol next to the objects that use that material. Now I'm not really sure if this is how it should be?
While it would be possible to use a material that isn't used in the scene to add the IES, this feels illogical somehow, so I don't think I understand the underlying concept.
Is that because it's a "feature in progress" or am I actually missing something?

Thanks a TON!

Cheers,

Thomas Helzle

[notareal]

... So, please try this first: open a shell, go to Applications folder and type: "open -a Thea.app -args -darkroom" (on Windows there is a link on the Start menu for this), open the scene and start rendering.

open -a Thea.app --args -darkroom

[giannis]

open -a Thea.app --args -darkroom

Right!