Thea Renderer

[jujubee]

Just curious: has anyone tried Thea and what are you thoughts in comparison to Vray?

I have a buddy that keeps on talking about it, but he knows little regarding Vray nor any post-processing, but he keeps insisting that it's a great tool. He's primarily a SU user and beta tests for them. So far, the renderings I've seen him produce from it are above average, but I don't know how much of that is limited to user-knowledge.

Thanks!

[vlado]

It might be best to ask this on a renderer-agnostic forum, f.e. a general SketchUp forum

Best regards,
Vlado

[andybot_cg]

I tried Thea a while back. Certainly, a lot of sketchup users are fans and you can find a lot of them at sketchucation. They also have a forum for Thea that's pretty active. As for my assessment relative to vray, I just found it not to my taste. It's got a studio environment that I found quite clunky, and I felt the material editor was a little too structured and less flexible, compared to vray. I also didn't feel their biased rendering settings were that great. I guess I've just been spoiled by vray.
I wanted to like it so I could use instancing with Sketchup models, but I just found it quite lacking in doing what I wanted it to do at the time (create animations). I am using vray for Blender for my more complicated arch-viz stuff and vray for SU for the simple stuff. I <3 vray!

Andy