Altair Unveils Thea Render Version 3

Altair debuts Thea Render version 3, which brings new features, workflow enhancements and speed improvements in several areas.

Adaptive Tracing

Adaptive Tracing is a technique that solves complicated lighting scenarios, such as caustics from point lights, sun pool caustics and diffuse interreflections. This results in images with a higher dynamic range and lighting effects that were previously impossible.

Relight Editor

Relight allows users to create infinite images from a single render. When Relight is enabled, every light in the scene can then be modified (intensity, color and status) and create different lighting setups in post production. Every Relight setup can be saved in the Relight Editor panel as a Snap and then loaded back to the Darkroom for further editing or exported to an image file.

Random Color Texture

Random color is a procedural texture that can be used to add variation to your instanced models and create rich looking images for grass, bushes, trees, wooden floor and more.

Support for Intel Open Image Denoiser

The Intel Open Image Denoiser is now integrated inside Thea Render. The AI-accelerated denoiser provides noise-free images and runs on the CPU.

Interactive Denoising

Denoising with both Intel’s and NVIDIA’s AI denoisers is also supported during an interactive rendering session. Watch video here.

Support for NVIDIA CUDA 11

Thea Render makes use of the latest NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit, which introduces support for the NVIDIA Ampere architecture.

New in Thea for SketchUp v3

Thea for SketchUp has been updated with new features and workflow enhancements too. Some are:

• Local Proxy Material Editing. Thea Proxy materials can now be edited with the Material Editor with a click of a button.
• Better refresh of high-resolution production renders. High-resolution images refresh faster without locking the interface.
• Optimized Glare. Glare is now multithreaded and CPU/GPU accelerated, making it faster.
• Faster interactive scene updates. Geometry heavy scenes perform faster during interactive rendering and object translation is now faster.

More Updates

Additional updates include support for Lindalë Skatter v2, out-of-core rendering; multithreaded export; HDR region render; enhanced channels; improved interactiveness; and user interface improvement.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.