Thea Render Revision 446

[giannis]

Dear friends,

it is finally out, our next major revision just before Christmas and new year. With this new revision, you can find our latest development that includes two recent technical advances; the improved efficiency of TR1 engine and the terminator artifact fix.

Basically, with this revision, you can get faster results with TR1 in difficult lighting situations, typically sun-sky lit interiors or other cases. The noise is now more balanced while the strength of previous TR1 version is kept for exteriors and direct lighting situations.

The terminator artifact fix is a major improvement for Thea, which also means that you can work/render meshes with less detail (i.e. less RAM consumption) without suffering from these ugly artifacts on the shading limit. Just in case any of your models has a very bad meshing, we still kept a failsafe parameter (called Shadow Tight in models' parameters) for Thea to revert to previous evaluation.

Besides the above advances, there are numerous small fixes here and there; corrections in some evaluations for TR1 engine (mainly when scattering media are present), network rendering improvements, fixed broken sun-sky animation, fix when animating a group and others.

There are also two feature additions that have great potential. One is the ambient occlusion that has been added for Adaptive (BSD) engine; it can be computed as a pseudo-GI lighting contribution to the image or as a separate pass. There is also a dirt texture (found in General tab in the material editor) that you can use in conjunction with ambient occlusion. This is a feature that we would like to improve and extend (as well as adding some extra render passes).

The second nice feature you will find, is user interface related. It is possible now to specify a region to render (rather a whole resolution render) in the popup render dialog. Even more, if you have already made a render in the darkroom, you can right click on the image and drag to draw a region. This region is then automatically selected in the render dialog. More enhancements based on this feature as well as OpenGL viewport region selection will be added.

We hope that you are going to enjoy this revision and create some beautiful images!

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

best wishes

[noro]

WOW -i think that's all i can say .

Greetings,

[dbalex]

nice I'm just working on a project in thea so will test it right away! thanks for the new features!

[dbalex]

render region is a crazy feature! testing it right now and it's great! thanks giannis! I will sleep an hour more this night with this new feature helping me

[sirrodney]

Fantastic..thank you!

[smvwhite]

Excellent news and many thanks for the new enhancements.
Hope you guys have a good rest over Christmas.

[christrapeze]

hooray it xmas,,,,,, again great work thea team and i am looking foreward to trying out these new features aspeicially render region, and fast work since its request as a development idea

[giannis]

Thanks!

Just saw something wrong, there are presets TR1+ & TR2+ included, while they were not supposed to - they will act exactly like TR1 and TR2 (we used these presets during testing but they are now obsolete).

I am sorry for the confusion. TR1 included in RV446 IS the enhanced engine.

best wishes

EDIT: You can safely delete the TR1+ and TR2+ from your presets.

[Panga]

Thanks a lot Giannis and all the Team, region render is definitly a good addition !! and for the rest, nothing more to say but a big applause !!!

Merry Christmas to all the Team.

Regards.

[Robertus_pl]

Where do I find render region feature? Is there any icon or only shortcut?