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thea render presto square

Thea Render 1.3 'Presto Square' is now available with some exciting new features along with substantial improvements for the Presto engine.

Presto Square now runs on both GPU and CPU simultaneously, unleashing the full potential of your computer. Render times have being slashed utilizing this new technology.

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Presto GPU+CPU

Presto is now running on both GPU and CPU simultaneously, harvesting all your computer raw power. What does this mean?

thea render benchmark

With every GPU and CPU core running Presto, it means fast, very fast, rendering. And this fast rendering is coupled with Thea's material/light system. All in all, pure quality in the shortest render times

New Physical Sky

The new Improved Physical Sky is much more accurate for spectral rendering and yields much better results in higher values of turbidity (which are usually wanted to give special mood to a render). The parameters for the new physical sky model are basically the same with similar influence on the image but more accurate response and are available for all render engines.

Instancing Support for Presto

thea render instancing

Presto has now full instancing support. After various small and big memory improvements, millions of instanced polygons can now be rendered without a problem. Presto can now handle all the geometric complexity you want.

Micro Roughness

In nature, a usual observation for very smooth objects is that their reflections vary from blurred to sharp gradually, as the viewing angle goes from normal to shallow. We are very proud to introduce the idea of Micro Roughness, as a means to control this phenomenon. With Micro Roughness we have control over two parameters corresponding to the micro structure of the surface, the average width and height of the micro anomalies on the surface (measured in micro meters).

Sampling Improvements for Presto

Presto is now quite more sophisticated in terms of algorithmic design. With the addition of various sampling improvements, such as for scenes with area lights, image-based lighting, subsurface scattering, scenes in the presence of many light sources and antialiasing filtering, Presto converges much faster and this takes place without losing its interactivity.

Camera Z-Clipping

camera clipping for rendering section cuts in sketchup

You can now cut and render the geometry beyond a near and far distance and have a look inside objects and constructions!

SSS and Volumetrics for Presto

Not only subsurface scattering and volumetrics are supported by Presto but they are also delivered fast, truly realistic, without any approximations.

 

About the Author

rich O'Brien

This article was written by 

Rich is SketchUcation's Managing Director and Certified SketchUp Trainer. He has a background in aviation technical training and is also the editor of CatchUp WebMag