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Carlosan
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Thea 1.4 is Released

 

 
 
Our milestone edition 1.4 brings powerful new features along with substantial improvements for Thea Presto engine. These improvements include Displacement, Motion Blur, Render Channels, Relight Support and faster Interactive Render among others. The new edition is now available and to celebrate we have launched promotional offers!
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I'm currently using it on a project, and if you have a beefy NVidia card, the GPU/CPU hybrid render is smoking fast. The Interactive speed is so good, it's almost like working with Mormoset. It's not blobby and all pixelated as you make changes or move about in the scene, it's practically rendering in near full resolution the whole time....just a little noise as it refreshes. But not much. I bought my seat during the same time frame...Christmas sale. Can't find a better deal on a GPU/CPU hybrid render (plugins for 3ds Max, C4D, Blender and Sketchup). It's roughly $300USD right now. Octane costs about $600. Arion about $750. Furryball is normally in that pricerange, too.

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I bought it before the sale, not even regretting it =)

 

Still feel like buying octane as well though, that seems to be taking the industry standard flag... unfortunately...

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I bought it before the sale, not even regretting it =)

 

Still feel like buying octane as well though, that seems to be taking the industry standard flag... unfortunately...

Octane is really nice, but it's not going to give you anything you don't already have in Thea. Plus, Thea's  Presto engine uses every ounce of juice from your GPU and likewise your CPU (Intel Embree raytracing Kernel).

http://theapresto.com/benchmark.html

 

Octane uses only the GPU. Thea also has an OpenCL mode in the works...so, if you wanted to use AMD cards, you could. This 1.4 release comes with Bucket Rendering for Presto, to circumvent memory limitation issues that might arise in some heavy scenes. New Render Channel/Passes, including World Position pass, which Fusion uses for volumetric fog

 

It doesn't yet have hair primitive support, like Octane does, so I've been waiting on that....but if you compare the feature list of each, they are neck and neck. So, you might as well save your money for something else.

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I bought it before the sale, not even regretting it =)

 

Still feel like buying octane as well though, that seems to be taking the industry standard flag... unfortunately...

...oh, and by the way, if you bought it within the last 10 days, there is a refund  for the discount. Pretty fair move on their part.

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...another little update. Was just rendering some product shots for a SmartPhone case and the new bucket rendering is pure awesome sauce! I've never seen a GPU do bucket rendering, so I think Thea broke new ground with that. Imagine VRay's production renderer using the GPU+CPU. That's how fast it is. It was already pretty impressive, but after seeing that, I'm like....

 

tumblr_ngpx3kWLls1smmsbuo1_400.gif

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Yeah I love that thea uses cpu and GPU mostly because it gives the CPU fallback option if one of my scenes is too big for my GPU, so i can just send it to a farm.

 

and with 1.4 they do seem very close. Although im not a fan of thea's material lab. And their c4d material interface needs some work compared to octanes, that looks much more polished.

 

Reason i might buy octane as well is because it seems to be gaining lots of popularity with the mograph c4d crowd. Some big names, making tutorials about it and pushing its adaptation forward. So i think it won't be up to me. I did manage to avoid the vray train, but i think this one im going to have to hop on to.

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Yeah I love that thea uses cpu and GPU mostly because it gives the CPU fallback option if one of my scenes is too big for my GPU, so i can just send it to a farm.

 

and with 1.4 they do seem very close. Although im not a fan of thea's material lab. And their c4d material interface needs some work compared to octanes, that looks much more polished.

 

Reason i might buy octane as well is because it seems to be gaining lots of popularity with the mograph c4d crowd. Some big names, making tutorials about it and pushing its adaptation forward. So i think it won't be up to me. I did manage to avoid the vray train, but i think this one im going to have to hop on to.

Yeah, I try to avoid getting caught up in all the notoriety and hype surrounding software, just because x, Y, and Z studios use it. Everyone has different tastes and preferences, so I can understand why some would choose one over the other. After learning the material lab setup, I have no problem with it. Seems they wanted to avoid a nodal network in order to keep things more simple and easier to understand. Not everyone likes nodal networks, and are somewhat put off by the added complexity.

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I get most of my work from studios. So if they love octane, then i use octane =)

 

one of the downsides of working for studios vs clients directly, but i much prefer these downsides rather than directly dealing with clients..

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I get most of my work from studios. So if they love octane, then i use octane =)

 

one of the downsides of working for studios vs clients directly, but i much prefer these downsides rather than directly dealing with clients..

+100. Easier to deal with people who know how much work is involved in certain tasks and what it should typically cost. Dealing with the public is usually a matter of people wanting steak on a bologna budget.

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