No argument there.

For me, it was the modest price and stunning realism of the unbiased engine - not to mention the simple UI.

As far as the long-term effects of the acquisition, it worry that there will be a time someday when I go to install Thea on a new PC only to find that their server no longer validates my license.

Well, at least there is competition out there.

How does Thea for Rhino compare with Octane? I have Octane and like it.
eric

I personally also think it's currently among the best renderers out there - it's my personal favourite for years.

It's hard to know what will happen, but Altair at least is not Apple, Autodesk or Microsoft who are known to butcher perfectly fine software for parts.
They use Thea as renderer in their Solid Thinking CAD software, so it's unlikely it will die anytime soon.
The unknowns are, what direction it will take, whether prices stay reasonable and how host integration will develop in the future.

The integration in Rhino already is awesome and I personally would still recommend it highly. The standalone also works pretty well.
With the multiple render kernels it is usable in a very broad range of uses.
And things like bucket rendering on GPU let you render even huge stills - and there is always CPU fallback.

It also seems that the next bigger update is around the corner.

There always is a certain amount of unpredictability in everything and even more so after an acquisition, so it's hard to make solid recommendations at this point, but from a quality and price point, you can't go wrong with Thea IMO and so far Ioannis was more than fair with the users..

Cheers,

Tom

I personally think Thea is better than Octane, but feature by feature it may be a draw.
I have Octane for Lightwave and while it's well integrated, I hardly use it.
Octane 3 has hair, volumes and some other stuff like that, which Thea hasn't (yet).
Thea has GPU & CPU at the same time for quite a while already and it really flies while Octane only announced it so far AFAIK.
I like the material system in Thea better and while I normally am a total node-addict, I find the nodes in Octane rather limited and clumsy.
Thea feels more versatile to me and has a clearer workflow IMO.
ATM, a network rendernode for Thea is 49.- Euro and two are included in the initial purchase - Octane is much more expensive there.
Theas network setup is the most brilliant and fast I've ever encountered in 20 years of CG. Once set up (5 minutes per node max) you simple enable network rendering in Thea and all machines contribute very efficiently.
But if you have Octane already and like it, it may not be as interesting as if you would start from scratch.

Cheers,

Tom

I thought I'd post a neat little example of Thea Render's "Relight" feature.
(Sorry, it doesn't include the pie.)

http://www.mediafire.com/file/ue8j0w0az18peyu/Relight_Example.psd



Take the image into Photoshop and adjust or toggle the visibility of each layer to see how the image is affected.
Each layer is set to Screen mode.
In Thea, the separate Relight lighting channels produced are inherently HDR, so this Photoshop example is just a hack preview for fun.
If you use the Relight feature in Thea, you may enjoy the benefit from being able to adjust each lighting element in a room scene at will post-rendering, though you better have plenty of PC memory on hand.

Love to see so much Keyshot renders here. KS is my renderer of choice, too. For a year or so I only use KS for my rendering needs any more. No other software.

KS again... my ass...

Totally agreed!! Keyshot is simply way too expensive... Vray monthly is more affordable...or just get blender and import...Evee and Cycles are amazing.