A couple of Thea renders before I retire from the FormZ community

[jonmoore]

Hi All,

 

Thought I'd leave you with a couple of Thea renders before I retire from the FormZ community. My FormZ license expires tomorrow...

 

So onto the renders. During private testing I purposely avoided talking about Thea's GPU accelerated grunt as I wanted people to judge Thea on it's visual finesse. However over the last 24 hours I decided to put together two test renders that would 1.) show off Thea's speed on production workstations and 2.) show how Thea copes with one of my 'torture test' scenes (something I put together for when I'm testing new render engines). My production setup is a pair of HP Z620's each with dual Xeon's and each with a 6Gb Titan Black GPU; they're joined by my (humble by comparison) iMac 3.4Ghz i7.

 

So onto the renders before I reveal the blisstering speed of that setup!  

 

 

 

The first of these renders (rendered at 1080p) was complete in a shade under 7 minutes! Granted, I was using a production setup but nowhere near the latest and greatest of technologies. In fact the second of the Z620's was purchased in recent months on the second hand market for £700, and the Titan Black within it only cost £280. There's a lot of decent ex corporate equipment out there right now available for a fraction of what it cost only a few short years back. The Xeon 8 core (16 Thread) processors in my Z620's cost $1500 each in 2012 and that was purely the cost of the processor. So my two Z620's have a massive 64 render threads between them. The beauty of Thea Render is that it not only renders on the GPU but it uses every last CPU cycle available to it across your network (Mac or PC). I believe you get two render nodes included with the cost when you purchase Thea (three render nodes in total). Phenomenal value and performance compared to other options in the marketplace.

 

The second render wasn't about speed so I won't talk about that here but I will add that the same test in another unbiased CPU render engine was still not noise free after 24 hr's of rendering on a similar setup.The reason the second render is such a challenge is that it is the limited lighting and the vast number of louvered surfaces - just think of the billions  of light bounce calculations!

Anyway, if you haven't downloaded the public beta yet, do it as soon as you can. And if you have downloaded but haven't yet purchased, what are you waiting for?  

 

There's a healthy discount available on Thea whilst it's still in beta which makes it's value even better.

 

Sales pitch over (by the way I don't get commission I just believe the Thea team have a great product). Hopefully I'll bump into one or two of you in other 3d forums in the months ahead. And I'll carry on posting here if the V-ray beta is available in FormZ Free (Thea works in all three flavours of FormZ).

Best regards all, had some fine times here and met some thoroughly decent folk as part of the bargain.

 

J x

[R2D2]

Jon,

hope you can find a way to stick around and contribute here.

License expires ? There must be a way to solve that issue...

 

As for Thea I am really impressed about its speed and about to hit the buy button after sorting out some initial problems.

I  would be interested how many Fzers would go for Thea. Its great to have a choice now, maybe once Vray is out even better.

And after all the rant for render plugins over the years its now hard to tell if three (Maxwell, Thea, maybe Vray) competitors might be too many to share those FZ users that look for something next to renderzone. 

Guess it does take some manpower to adapt these plugins, and if you develop stuff you need a solid user base. 

 

 

 

[jonmoore]

Thanks for the kind words R2D2. I hope the expiring license had nothing to do with that that critical post. I've certainly not had any formal communication from the powers that be at AutoDeSsys regarding the post. Chaos Group found my feedback useful and I'm now testing the forthcoming Rhino, Revit & Sketchup integrations for them (that use the latest V-Ray core).

 

Integrating a rendering plugin is far more difficult than one might think. True integrations can take anything up to 24 months to get right. Export based integrations such as Octane can be quicker because the artist has less control in their DCC/CAD application. I'm testing the 3ds Max Redshift integration at the moment and that's still officially classed as being in Alpha status (after 18 months of work).

 

People often complain about the high cost of rendering engines but when you consider the amount of work that goes into each integration for what can be in many cases a limited potential pool of customers it begins to make more sense.

 

The team at Solid Iris have done a tremendous job with Thea. It's the only renderer I know of that scales so linearly across network nodes whilst utilising all available CPU and GPU resources. Redshift is even faster than Thea because it's a biased solution (much like V-Ray) but it requires more technical knowledge from the artist. However Redshift is the only viable GPU solution for animations - I just wish it would use my Xeon's as well as my GPU's!  

 

Because of the consultancy work I do I'm constantly experimenting with all manner of rendering solution but right now Redshift, Thea and V-Ray cover any rendering challenge I encounter. Octane is impressive because of it's low priced 'Cloud' option but it offers less artistic control than Redshift, Thea or V-Ray. Nvidia's iRay is also very impressive but it's pricing model is ridiculous. But It's phenomenally easy to use so I have a feeling it's going to be a big success, and the old dinosaur 'Mental Ray' is gradually becoming GPU enabled too. Too many renderers not enough hours in the day...  

 

I hope to continue contributing here but we'll have to wait and see what happens with the V-Ray beta.