THEA render VS V-Ray for interior visualization

[farzad_moshiri]

Hi guys

 

I recently read about the new developed "THEA render", and apparently the results are nice.

 

Has anyone used both V-Ray and Thea render in order to have a review specifically for interior visualization?

 

Does it worth to change the working flow from V-Ray to Thea render?

 

Thank you

[Devin Johnston]

My main concern is speed and flexibility. Vray is fast and has lots of features that have taken years to developed, IDK if Thea is ready for a direct comparison but I'd like to see one.

[Scott Schroeder]

http://www.3dworldmag.com/2011/06/22/review-thea-render/

 

Providing meaningful comparisons between rival render engine times is almost impossible given that they all use different algorithms, but in our subjective experience, it’s impressively fast.

 

PROS

• Fast and stable

• Cheap

• Potentially massive time-saver

 

CONS

• Inadequate, confusing UI

• Poor documentation

[Devin Johnston]

Good find Scott! I wonder what their forum is like, with Vray you can get a solution to most problems within a few minutes/hours and that's almost as important as the power and flexibility of a program in my book.

[Scott Schroeder]

I don't know but they did get dinged for tutorials and the manual in that review. The user base and tutorials seemed to be vastly lacking and that would factor into my adapting a rendering engine as well. There's no point in having a good engine when you can't figure out how to do a simple task. More than likely it's lacking because it's new and hasn't been overly adopted yet. Vray has been around for a while and has thousands of talented users who share their knowledge, THEA just can't match that right now.

[John Dollus]

Wow, tough crowd. If you would have used vray at the initial .0x releases, it never would have made it out of the gate.

Still, I don't see anything unique about Thea that would make me want to invest in it as a tool.

The photometric analysis component has potential but I would need to see what sort of reporting data is available. False color display isn't of practical use without the data.

Lastly, they really should consider getting it into the hands of a couple top studios to work with for a bit and develop a better collection of example images. kitchen renderings don't pay the bills and without render stats showing processing time/hardware/pre-post adjusting, there's little to motivate adoption.

[Devin Johnston]

Wow, tough crowd. If you would have used vray at the initial .0x releases, it never would have made it out of the gate.

Yes but back then your choices for GI engines were Vray, Final Render and I guess you can throw in 3d Studio's radiosity engine. Today it's going to be a lot harder to get into the game without significant advantages over what's already available. For instance if THEA would have made their GI engine super easy to use with minimal settings to adjust they would have had a big advantage over Vray. There is one other problem that I just discovered, you don't get an unlimited render node license. This is a big deal for anyone with a render farm at $95 per node it would cost me over 10K to upgrade and when you add in the time it would take to redo all my existing models and material libraries it's not worth it.

[Scott Schroeder]

I cut my teeth on Max's standard lighting and Brazil, so talk about a pain in the arse. The network licensing is crucial, I think that's what effectively kept Mental Ray out of the game for so long and allowed Vray to gain a foothold in the old timey days. I know where I used to work when we were looking at adopting a GI solution back in 2004, we looked at both Mental Ray and Vray. The reality was, it came down to network licensing costs.

[Devin Johnston]

Maxwell has the same problem, they charge you for every 5 nodes or something like that and it's really hard to justify the extra expense compared to vray. I don't understand why they do this because they are limiting the number of people who will to use their product. If they had an unlimited node license I think they'd sell more of their product and make more money in the end.

[John Dollus]

Agree completely. Charging per node is a deal killer

[beestee]

Depends on how many nodes you really need. VRay is $1275 US at the moment for the current version that works with 3DS Max, whereas Thea is $420 with 2 nodes and the 3DS Max plugin, additional costs are $120 per additional render node license and $40-$90 for each additional 3d modeling software plugin.

 

For comparisons sake it only seems to be a deal killer if you have more than 9 render nodes per user and only ever want to use 3DS Max.

[Devin Johnston]

Agreed, if you have 9 or more machines it doesn't make since financially unless it's just so much faster than Vray it makes up in speed what Vray needs in raw rendering power. I find this highly unlikely however since the article made it sound like they were about the same speed wise. For a freelancer or small 3d studio THEA may be a great option though.

[Scott Schroeder]

Don't forget to factor in the downtime to convert all of your props, materials, and the loss of Vray Proxies for high poly items (unless Thea has this, but you'd still need to convert everything). That can easily cost into the thousands of dollars of painstakingly boring tasks. For companies, this is generally cost prohibitive. For freelancers, unless you have a lot of time on your hands, forget it. You can't risk taking that much downtime and still pay your bills.

 

If you are starting from scratch, then everything I just said isn't much of a factor.

[ioannispantazopoulos]

Dear friends

 

I have registered to answer a few of the questions that pop up in this thread. I am involved with Thea Render development and management.

 

First of all, let me say that we don't expect miracles with users changing their workflow from another renderer to Thea. This is indeed something that takes time and we believe in short steps, with more & more users trusting us over time.

 

About now, the support for proxies. Yes, this is possible and there is a

.

 

About spending a lot of time changing the materials to the new renderer, we have actually a surprise here; there is an automated material converter, you can see the

. Of course, such an automated solution gives good results for most of the cases, but there may be cases where some manual fine tuning is still needed - we believe this is acceptable.

 

About the article in 3dworld magazine, note that this is relatively old now. There are quite many improvements from that date, not to mention our upcoming release v1.2 where GPU engine support will be added and our biased engine has been redesigned for maximum robustness & quality.

 

It is also worth saying that we have, at least so far, long development cycles, with users getting all updates within our beta and v1.x releases, free of charge.

 

Finally, with respect to render nodes, it is indeed a problem for large render farms. For this, we are willing to add an option with our upcoming release v1.2 for node volume licensing (30 machines) at a competitive price.

 

Thank you very much for your time and reading this,

Ioannis Pantazopoulos

[Motiva .]

Hi all,

 

first of all thank you for your interest on Thea for 3dsmax!

...

Edited: since I said more or less the same as Ioannis

...

 

Thank you and we'll be glad to continue earing your opinions!

Edited March 8, 2013 by Motiva

[Devin Johnston]

Thank you for the response and the additional information, I'm glad to know that there is a material converter and that proxies are supported as this is a big deal!

 

I am still concerned about the price of Thea as it relates to network rendering and it isn't necessarily the case that a single workstation will have access to less than 30 machines. I don't think any users like the per node licensing scheme, I know other software developers have gone down this road like Next Limit and e-on and they've suffered for it. When you make it too expensive to render out projects your turning lots of people of to what might be a superior product because there unwilling to pay for something that other packages give away. It's your decision of course but in my opinion this isn't the way to go especially if your new in the market and looking to make inroads.

[leobreault]

Having been a vray user, I must say I prefer Thea. It is comparable in speed when using biased settings. I prefer using their unbiased settings as they get better results. One key factor that has been a huge timesaver for me is the relight function. It is nice to be able to adjust the lights after the render is complete. You can also work with motiva colimo (if you buy the license) and repaint materials after the render is complete. I personally do a bunch of furniture work and it really helps me to be able to change from cherry to walnut and not have to re render. As far as the community in the forums, they are great. You typically get answers extremely fast. They have a very dedicated user base.

 

Just my 2 cents.

[beestee]

I have been contemplating this purchase for about a week now, and finally decided to take the jump after reading the impression above.

 

I am a long time VRay user at my place of employment and I regret not getting a license for myself while it was still in beta. I have been using Mental Ray lately because I cannot convince my employer to upgrade our VRay licenses to 2.0 and I feel that we will be left behind if we stick to using the older version without interactive rendering capabilities...but I really miss some of VRay's strengths such as IBL and simple proxy creation and use.

 

I look forward to acquainting myself with Thea.

[Mario Pende]

Hi Guys!

Ive been looking at Thea for some time now.

Its affordable pice of software and it has evolved nicely thru these few years + a user community forum is simply great.

I read a few online reviews where there where statements thats it a FAST engine.

Unbiased engine beeing fast sounds like an lullaby :-)

Biased engine on the other hand might be...but I remeber also reading few user comments that rendering interiors with biased engine takes also a long time.

Anyone here using Thea on daily basis?

Would like to hear from first hand opinions on Thea.

R we talking around +12 hours for rendering interior/exterior scene...

Thanx

[Mario Pende]

No THEA users here? :-(

[Derek Forreal]

the vast majority here are Max/Vray users. of those left over, it's safe to assume that most use Mental Ray and outside of those 2 it's difficult to get much excitement going on around here, which is a shame as many other engines have come on leaps and bounds, and Thea is certainly one of them.

 

Thea is an excellent render engine, and is unique in offering unbiased, biased and GPU engines. The GPU engine in particular is growing in features by the day. just yesterday Solid Iris (Thea developers) announced a new hybrid GPU+CPU engine, support for SSS, Camera Clipping and some other great new features.

 

As always, the options you have are very much dictated by what your specific needs are, so you should try the demo and see if it fits your way of working.

[AJLynn]

Don't Vray and mental ray both include biased, unbiased and GPU capabilities now?

[Derek Forreal]

ah right, well it's been a few years now since i looked into either of them so they may well do.

 

i'm not familiar with technical terms so forgive me, but is Vray's or MR's unbiased rendering comparable to Thea/Maxwell/Indigo and the like? in such render engines things like caustics and reflected caustics (for example) are part of the lighting solution and don't need specific setup.

 

Thea's GPU also has a GPU+CPU option, though this has only just been announced and will only be available in the next update.

 

but like i said, it's hard to get any interest in anything but Vray/MR around here

[AJLynn]

I don't know as much about Vray's implementation but iray (which is part of mental ray in newer versions) uses CUDA, which can run on CPU, nVidia GPU or both at the same time, and behaves very much like Maxwell, including rendering caustics and taking forever. You can pretty much leave it in default mode and just set its finish criteria (time, number of loops, or until you hit stop).

[Derek Forreal]

I don't know as much about Vray's implementation but iray (which is part of mental ray in newer versions) uses CUDA, which can run on CPU, nVidia GPU or both at the same time

the nice thing about Thea is that it's all under one roof and there is no weak engine. if you need total fidelity you choose unbiased, if you need speed you can choose biased or GPU depending on the scene. if you need speed above everything else then GPU has an Ambient Occlusion mode which is super fast and looks great (though not accurately lit).

 

including rendering caustics and taking forever.

i think that pretty much sums it up. i said above that it depends on specific needs. if you value quality and detail over speed then Thea's unbiased rendering is second to none in terms of lighting and shading quality. if you value speed above everything else then it remains to be seen if Vray is quicker and better given equal render times and the same scene.

 

in any case from what i've read the best Vray renders have pretty long render times anyway. looking through some of the best renders on various forum galleries, render times of several hours are often reported.

 

in addition to that there's the fact that you're pretty much tied to 3ds Max if you want to use Vray or MR, whereas that's not the case with other engines. again, Max is widely regarded as the industry standard for ArchVis, but it's a long way from being a fluid and intuitive modeller.

 

just my humble opinion of course and just tying to say that there are alternatives out there for those that really want them.

Edited October 3, 2013 by derekforreal