Thea Render Revision 481

[giannis]

Dear friends,

this is another quick revision with small fixes here and there.

Quality-wise, there is a small improvement when rendering non-power-of-2 textures (for example, 200x200 instead of 256x256); they will appear sharper. The difference will be negligible though for high-resolution textures. Additionally, an important bug on MacOSX reading XML files from SU plugin has been now resolved.

One nice addition in this revision, is that you can place (manually) the sun so that it matches the image used for sky illumination. This was asked in the past as a means to "align" the sun and IBL. This is possible because - starting from this revision - the image, in the IBL slot, is displayed in the OpenGL gizmo, whenever the sun is selected. Check the description page below, to see the series of steps needed to take advantage of this feature.

As always you can find the download links and changes log in the following thread:
http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewtop ... =61&t=1849

Additionally, for convenience, you can try the mirror links below:
Windows: http://www.solidiris.com/thearender/The ... v1.0.7.exe
Linux: http://www.solidiris.com/thearender/The ... 0.7.tar.gz
MacOSX: http://www.solidiris.com/thearender/The ... v1.0.7.dmg

best wishes

[Frederik]

Excellent improvements...!
Positioning the sun with an IBL is so easy now...

[Frankych]

Hi Ioannis,
here's a question I wanted to ask for a while now.
- is it an absolute necessity to use square textures in Thea? Or can we use any ratio? I'd say that at least 95% of my textures have an arbitrary ratio.
Prior to working with Thea I've been using ElectricImage for 13 years and the texture ratio didn't matter, which is why I have so many textures tailored made for custom bricks, paving, cladding and so on that are not square.

BTW, nice job on the new revision. There's no limit to your talent

Cheers
Francois

[riccky]

+10000 for the sun with IBL. Well done

[patricks]

Hi Ioannis,
here's a question I wanted to ask for a while now.
- is it an absolute necessity to use square textures in Thea? Or can we use any ratio? I'd say that at least 95% of my textures have an arbitrary ratio.
Prior to working with Thea I've been using ElectricImage for 13 years and the texture ratio didn't matter, which is why I have so many textures tailored made for custom bricks, paving, cladding and so on that are not square.

BTW, nice job on the new revision. There's no limit to your talent

Cheers
Francois

Hi Frankych

no it is not necessity to use square textures in Thea ..... Thea in older versions would benefit of using power of 2 textures which are any that match this criteria like 256 x 256, 512x512, 256 x 512 or 1024 x 512 etc.

now with this last version you dont have to worry about this and you can use any size you want getting great qualetie


Greetings Patrick

[giannis]

@Frankych: there was never such a restriction in Thea, neither before nor now. I believe that the bullet in the changes log can lead to misunderstanding; this is why I said here that in practice (bitmaps with a no-too-low resolution) the differences are unnoticeable.

Working with any version - earlier ones or the newest - will produce same high quality, there's really no fear about any ratio you use.

best wishes

[saurus]

Adjust sun IBL a wish came true.

[Rombout]

wow great feature, i did manually and didnt find it did big of problem

[ciccio]

great...great

[Frankych]

Hi Ioannis,
I never meant there was a restriction

Now further to the topic, would it be possible to have a mapping option to fit a texture to an object.
Most of the time my main models don't have UV (coming from ArchiCAD). So say I have a surface/plane that is 6.24 x 17.36 and I create a specific texture with the same ratio to match the surface.
It takes me a lot of trial and error to fit that texture to the plane in Thea (maybe I'm doing something wrong). I have to adjust the x and y values (scale and offset) independently by hand step by step until I reach my desired target, whereas I would at least expect the global scaling to work seamlessly since the basic ratio is correct... I'll try to setup a case study file to demonstrate my problem later on today.

Cheers
Francois



why is it sometimes so difficult for me to match a texture