Hm - I normally never use this Browser, since there is a better one available in the Native Thea Material Editor and I can edit there at the same time as select presets.
Since that one also is the same in Thea Studio, I find it easier to keep things synced that way.
But I now tried it and it worked here when I added my main custom material folder to it (I do not mix my own materials with the factory ones) - I was able to select materials from all the subfolders. When I added new folders externally I had to close the browser and re-open it to see the changes, otherwise it worked as expected and I was able to select the folders and see the materials in them.
The only thing I can think of is: do those folders contain Thea materials (.mat.thea)?
Material packs (.mat.pack) have to first be unpacked, either through Thea or with for instance 7zip - all the packed Thea files are basically .zip files. I often prefer manual unpacking since then I can organise things as I want them.
Yeah I started playing around with the material editor and realized that if I just hit the load button next to the thumbnail preview that I can easily load my materials no matter where they are. It makes more sense to access them that way.
I think the problem has to do with the material browser being more a part of the rhino plugin than as an integrated part of Thea Studio so it just may be a little buggy. I played around a bit more with it and I could get some folders to show and others not. but then if I closed the program and came back to it later another folder would suddenly be showing materials.
So who knows, Iām sticking with the native material editor.
But donāt hesitate to report the bugs you find - if nobody reports them, they wonāt get fixed
I actually hope for an update soon, the thumbnail bug is rather irritating (where either no thumbnails are generated or materials show thumbs from other materials).
This is how I have my editor set up - several tabs with direct access to my most used folders (some of them only make sense in Studio) and the main editor and texture lab visible:
Looking at a lot of the materials I have downloaded and, you are correct, they are mat packs. So how do I unpack these in Thea? And how can I do it in a way that I know where they are unpacked so I can get the materials organized?
Look two posts above
The packs are zip files, open them with your zip tool of choice, I use 7zip.
Then extract them to where you want them.
I never use the Thea installation routine for the packs, since then I canāt place them myself.
I just installed Thea on my old laptop because I was hoping to try out network rendering, so obviously I have a few questions.
The old laptop has a Quadro FX 880M and even though the specs say it has the correct CUDA version it still isnāt recognized by Thea. I still seem to be able to render using Presto, without any kind of warnings as well, but I wonder if not having the GPU aspect of Presto will impact quality as well as render time? Any thoughts on that?
Will the lack of a recognized GPU effect network rendering?
I understand how to setup the network rendering (at least it seems straightforward from what Iāve read), and this may seem like a silly question, but the computer that is setup as the server in the network renders along with the slave computer, correct? Do you need to have two slave computers to actually do network rendering?
And one last question, is Presto the only engine that will give you an estimated time calculation?
1.), 2.) No, thatās the beauty of Presto, it falls back seamlessly on CPU if the GPU doesnāt suffice and is still quite effective - no change in quality at all, only rendertime will be slower. I use that for networkrendering on an old MacPro that only has a 8800GT which isnāt supported, but two Xeons that can still contribute.
3.) Itās the coolest implementation of networkrendering I ever used. You start the Thea client on the slave, Thea Studio on the master, select āServer Beaconā on the master from the Help menu, in the client you go to settings and hit Server Scan, it finds the Server (worked every time here on my wired network) and thatās that.
Now if you want to render, in the settings for production rendering on the master, select Distribution -> Network -> Server.
Now each time you start a render, all slaves will get a copy of the scene (which depending on the scene takes a moment but it is rather quick) and contribute to the image you see on the master in realtime (you can set on each client how often it should update - for long renders itās more efficient to increase that time). You can start and stop clients at any time and they will hook into the running rendering or if you stop them, send what they did so far to the master and terminate. Extremely flexible and in my extensive sessions, I never had a single problem with it.
So itās totally up to you if and with how many clients you render, they will simply contribute to what your master does.
There also is a āPure Serverā Mode, but I never used that, I guess itās for larger networks where the master is busy with just serving.
Make sure that your clients donāt go to sleep ever, run on highest performance settings and donāt run on battery if itās a laptop. Otherwise you lose speed.
4.) You only get a time estimation if you set a fixed Termination Limit - which I hardly ever do.
Unbiased rendering - other than for instance Vray - does normally not have a defined end, which is one of the best aspects of it. Other than with a biased renderer, you donāt render an image and if the settings were too low, render again and again from scratch until it looks good - I normally let it simply cook until I like the quality.
You can even continue rendering at a later point if you save the image as Thea Image File .img.thea. That is a huge file that contains all the information Thea uses during rendering. If you later on load that image and the exact same scene into Thea Studio, you can happily continue with the rendering seamlessly.
Wow canāt wait to get the network rendering going. I am hoping that it really speeds things up when it comes time to do large scenes.
I did some test renders last night on a small structure on my old laptop. I mainly wanted to compare Presto AO and MC. I was impressed with the quality of both. MC took about 45 minutes and looked a lot crisper and AO took about 30 minutes and was a bit flat. But knowing that AO is faster and with some photoshop could look just fine is a nice to know.
I played around with BSD but I just couldnāt get it to work for me. All of the presets for exterior BSD spent an eternity in the calculating phase. 45 minutes for 75% calculation for an image that is 1500 x 840 resolution just seemed crazy to me. I could have gotten a much higher res image done with Vray in about 20 or 30 minutes.
But knowing how well Presto works I canāt see myself using anything else.
Got another question: I have a project with a lot of stair railings and hand rails that have cable railings which means a bunch of objects. Though the objects are just simple cylinders there are definitely a ton of them. Whenever I have that layer on I can feel my rhino file getting sluggish.
So I started playing around with a clipping map material and it seemed to work. Now I can just a simple extrusion with that material. So my question is: what would impact rendering speed more. A bunch of objects that are a 1/4 inch in diameter or a material with a clipping mask? The material is still a but buggy and I am working out the kinks but my hope is that it will allow me to model faster and render faster. Any thoughts?
I never use BSD so I canāt comment on that. Better ask in the Thea Forum for more info, some swear on it.
I only use Presto MC and sometimes TR1 or 2 when I want those amazing causticsā¦
I did enough parameter fā¦cking with biased engines to last me a lifetimeā¦
Thea, other than Rhino, doesnāt really care for geometry as long as it fits into your GPU memory (or main memory if you can live with the slowdown from CPU rendering).
I never did comparisons between tons of clip maps and tons of geometry, I usually go for geometry, but for leaves on trees for instance, clip maps are perfect - one polygon for a complex outline and tons of them.
The bottleneck there is Rhino, really.
I currently work a lot in Houdini and that can handle millions or even billions of points and polygons without breaking a sweat. Rhino is one of the worst tools I use in that department.
If you use hard clip maps, itās very fast, since it doesnāt have to compute any transparency. If you enable āSoftā, it is much slower if you have many such surfaces behind each other, since each ray travels through several of them. AFAIK hard clipping does not trigger transparency computation at all.
Where I use soft a lot is for groundplanes that fade out in the distance. Just put down a rectangle as large as you want the floor and put a radial gradient as texture into the clipping channel in Thea, then set it to soft.
Great when you want for instance a concrete floor to fade into a dark backgroundā¦
Adjust the gradient to taste in Photohop.
BTW. If you create complex layered textures in Photoshop, save them as tif with layers and zip compression. Thea and most other tools can use them as texture and this way you can keep them āliveā, for instance gradient layers and text etc. For high quality gradients, use 16Bit.
Yeah I did enough tweaking with Vray. Presto is just like magic.
What does hard or soft clip map refer to? I donāt recall seeing a setting like that. The material I made is just a simple white plastic with a super simple black and white image put into the clipping texture slot. The percentage is at 50%. I didnāt see any more options in the clipping panel I donāt think.
Yes, there is a Thea version for Linux.
You get two render slaves free with a standard license (Thea Studio or Thea for Rhino) and additional slave licenses are 49.- Euro.
Or get 30 for 399.- Euroā¦
Really worthwhile to get older machines to do some work if they are halfways decent.
The network monitor shows how much each client contributes, so itās easy to see which are worthwhile.
BTW. There is a small update to the Thea for Rhino plugin that fixes some silly problems with material thumbnails, brings back the āeasy materialā settings (I reported the feedback from this forum back to the devs and they instantly implemented a toggle to switch between the previous simple and extended GUI) and finally you can set the DOF settings as floating point values.
Find it in the forum: Thea For Rhino v1.5.07.321.1447 - Thea Render Forum
Look again , the last row is a parameter called āSoftā with a checkmark at the end. For your task, keep it unchecked.
But a white image will not do anything, it only makes sense to use this if you have a real alpha channel image, like the outline of the leave in the tree example - inner parts you want to keep are white, the part that should be invisible is black.
Check the Thea Forum - that is discussed regularly.
Basically you create one or more clumps of grass and either paint them on or populate your groundplane with instances in Thea Studio (instancing tab on the right) or you somehow create blocks (which translate into Thea instances) and randomise them in Grasshopper or Rhino - I think there are some tools for that.
Rhino doesnāt deal well with large numbers of items, so you have to see what works best.
But when I import e.g. one of those trees that come with Thea I can just āImport as Bounding Boxā. Isnāt it possible to create the surface I want to have grass on in Rhino, export it to some other piece of software, create the grass, export as whatever and then I just import my lawn as a bounding box while Rhino isnāt slowed down??
Do you perhaps know some piece of software that I can use to easily create grass that interacts well with Rhino??
First: Iām not into architectural stuff (see my website), so Iām not the best person to ask, which is why I pointed you towards the Thea forum where many architectural guys are around and even offer pre-made grass to download.
But you basically answered your own question: If you either export your basic grass from Rhino as Thea scene or load some grassblades into Thea Studio and save them as thea object, you can then import them the same as the objects that come with Thea Studio into Rhino. They are shown as bounding box and basically blocks/instances. You can also export your ground plane to Thea and populate it there and then re-import that.
But as I said, there are better people to ask this than me.
, the last row is a parameter called āSoftā with a checkmark at the end. For your task, keep it unchecked.