this is amazing!!! thanks!!!
… on my machine…
1 Like
Hi Ernst,
Yeah I think you will get some good results a lot faster in V7 compared to Flamingo, and you eliminate dependencies to having the plugin installed. Also make sure you compare the Renderer vs. The Raytrace more (right-click on the viewport name). They are slightly different engines/results. Raytrace mode uses Cycles engine, and Nathan has been working on that a lot.
It would be a good test to see what that tugboat (which looks awesome BTW) render looks like in V7 using the default render vs. Viewport Raytrace mode.
BTW, I don’t use any on them, we use external plugins, for our own insufferable reasons, but I think what they are doing here without plugins is coming along quite well.
Best,
Gustavo
Raytraced viewport and Rhino Render v7 should both produce exactly the same results since they are exactly the same engine.
Oooh, things have evolved then. Nice!
G
So Thea seems to have been bought out by Altair since 2.0. I was very happy with Thea but after spending the whole weekend I am very disappointed with the whole Altair thing. I was ready to upgrade but Altair has gone to a subscription mode and I see very little that they have added to what was a great renderer. I went to their support for the install and it seems like I am not the only one disappointed. I’ve been happy with the efforts of Nathan with Cycles and will probably pass on Thea 3.0 unless you can enlighten us foriegner on just what is so amazing and powerful about the new Thea 3.0. Nothing from your renders above impresses me. The OP’s efforts in Flamingo are very nice considering how long Flamingo has been around.
In my renders just did a fast render only plan with water material and play with Environment with HDRI.
Here you can find what’s new in Thea Render V 3.0 for Rhino.
This was my first efforts using the Cycles render in Rhino7 just a couple of months ago. Like I said I got excited to see Thea Render for Rhino V3 and have been through all the vids including the one you posted here. I started a separate thread here a couple weeks ago trying to get feedback about Thea For Rhino V3 and got absolutely zero response. I downloaded the trial for V3 and went through an absurd licensing scheme via Altair only to find it was not truly a trial and Altair has pretty much ruined Thea for me although I still do have my 2.0 license. Are you affiliated with Thea foreigner?
1 Like
Were you able to get Thea for Rhino v3 to run on Rhino7? I jumped through all the hoops between Thea and Altair and downloaded Thea 3 and Thea Node and installed but never was able to get it to run in R7. Thea support was not much help and I am not the only one having issues.
Marek, it is possible to have v2 on v6 and v3 on v7 for example. Every rhino plugin has to be registered in the plugin registry. In the case of Thea this is:
CODE: SELECT ALL
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\McNeel\Rhinoceros\%version%\Plug-ins\0AB51401-0CA2-45E3-94E0-46D77B129353
Thea don’t ask you what to do during installation but you can do it manually and provide old Thea v2 Path in Rhinoceros\6.0 version. Then you’ll be able to use both - or at least keep old and evaluate new on v7.
I’m not affiliated with Thea.
But i like that rendering engine.
Thea v3.0 support Rhino 6,7 and 8 wip, and you can use v2.0 on Rhino 6 and v 3.0 on Rhino 7,8 wip.
More baffling and waffling at Thea/Altair.
D-W wrote: ↑Sat Mar 06, 2021 9:56 amNo, they already said it here https://www.thearender.com/forum/viewto … 89#p195789 - V2 node-locked license does not allow you to get the free update you must buy a lease license FWIW there is no discount at all for old users.
It is a really curious policy. Of course i would be not very smart if i pay a full priced new license without any discount instead of keep using 2.2 version which is very close. All software that i’ve ever used included Rhino has been proposed at a discount price when upgraded.
And in addiction, i don’t like leased licenses, in this case Vray at almost 700€ perpetual license becomes more suitable than Thea at 550 for 3 years.
So i’ll continue to use v2.2 and then will change to something else, with many congrats to the sales fox.
Don't get me wrong, I love (loved...) Thea and have used it for years until this move to v3 and Altair.
D-W wrote: ↑Sat Mar 06, 2021 9:56 amNo, they already said it here https://www.thearender.com/forum/viewto … 89#p195789 - V2 node-locked license does not allow you to get the free update you must buy a lease license FWIW there is no discount at all for old users.
It is a really curious policy. Of course i would be not very smart if i pay a full priced new license without any discount instead of keep using 2.2 version which is very close. All software that i’ve ever used included Rhino has been proposed at a discount price when upgraded.
And in addiction, i don’t like leased licenses, in this case Vray at almost 700€ perpetual license becomes more suitable than Thea at 550 for 3 years.
So i’ll continue to use v2.2 and then will change to something else, with many congrats to the sales fox.
As you can see here in this copy/paste from Thea forum, they are not offering an upgrade to existing customers on V3. They have completely turned on their edu licenses too! If you go to Altair and do a search they don’t even seem to be aware of Thea. There must be 50 various softwares on the Altair site and it appears that Thea is just having them handle the licensing issues, and not very well at that. Can I ask if you have bought the new V3 Thea and successfully installed it?
More from the Thea forum
If we should be precise, the perpetual is only for V5 but upgrade version from neXt to V5 is available at a half the price.
Personally , being a professional user that changes pc’s , cards and upgrades softwards very often, i would have nothing against leased licenses, what i don’t understand is why there isn’t available any upgrade chance for 2.2 to 3 instead of putting v2.2 in the recycle bin and buy a new v3 at a full price.
Lets keep the thread on rendering solutions and leave out any licensing models.
1 Like
Right Nathan, I thought this thread was originally about a path from the old obsolete Flamingo to the new Cycles Rhino rendering and how that might solve the OP’s issues. You have really opened my eyes to the possibilities and Thea really has little to do with this thread. Sorry if I strayed from the original path but the Thea plug didn’t sit well with me after all the time I just recently spent trying to upgrade.
I think all Thea posts should be deleted, they are a complete distraction, and people looking for info on better rendering workflows native to Rhino will dismiss this entire thread because of all that noise.
We can always to a new/separate thread of “which renderer is better”. Because as we all know they are so useful.
Also the “I hate subscriptions and people who steal my lunch” are also lovely threads, but I rather keep those discussions in completely separate threads too. Actually, it would be even better to keep those thoughts in personal journals, each in their own computers, no in the cloud, ever.
G
1 Like
Back to the topic at hand here! I admire the OP sticking to the old Flamingo rendering on his tugboats and he get the job done well with it. His complaint about others in the office meddling about and screwing up his Flamingo renderings reminds me of when I worked in a NA office that specialized in metal boat production detailing. Pretty renders were not a big concern for them but when I was hired they tried to make me into an AutoCad/Shipconstructor operator. Didn’t take long for them to discover that my Flamingo renders generated a lot of interest and was essential with clients in developing a design. I went back to 2009 renders of a Trinity Yachts project to see what my peak was using Flamingo. I was never really happy with the sky/water look out of Flamingo but eventually got proficient with it. I did find that on BIG complex designs such as this it was very time consuming to set up materials and others in the office could scramble things inadverdently. I learned to keep a separate render model from the production model and kept that to myself away from the AutoCad/Shipconstructor goons!
This is probably one of the best Flamingo renders at that time (12 years ago!) just before I started phasing into using Brazil.
By contrast, here is an early Octane render of the same project a couple of years later. BRAZIL was sort of an interim tool and for some reason I can’t find many examples of that. OCTANE was much faster to set up and the render times were greatly improved but not anywhere near the speed that came with later GPU based render engines.
1 Like
The water I was able to create in the older versions of Flamingo was pretty good. But I can’t create anything acceptable with the new version for some reason. With the old version I recall stacking bump patterns to achieve this:
Making a matte with the model over real wake/water, while limiting your view options, I feel is far superior:
Another trick up my sleeve is to get our CFD (computational fluid dynamics) team to export a mesh from the actual model so the wake is literally from that hull. It takes a little photoshop to make that look good tho:
1 Like
Sweet work, Ernest! That is the best marine design rendering I have seen in Flamingo. Why fix it if it isn’t broken? Seriously, you will soon get up to speed with Cycles and save much time, effort and rendering time. I moved on from Flamingo to Brazil for a while but soon replaced that with OCTANE. The thing that made me move on to THEA was that THEA recognized Rhino clipping planes. Not sure if OCTANE ever got that figured out.
Let’s stay in touch!
With Rhino Render in v7 you’d use a normal map for the waves. I recently explained it a bit here Renders some glass weird - #5 by nathanletwory . In that post you’ll find a simple example material that you can use.
Of course if you have the CDF simulation mesh for a water body you definitely should use that, along with a simple PBR material to get the right color and some extra texture via a normal map. If you have a displacement map you could do a dense mesh grid with that map in the displacement channel of a PBR material.
In general I prefer an actual plane over the ground plane, since you control its size and thus can optimize for BVH accelleration structure generation.
Another really simple example for water I did in