Hi mac,
indigo is just a renderer. To set up a scene (materials, lights) you need another Programm.
I´m using sketchUp, but many others are supported. (thank you Michael for the excellent moi to SU export)
Yes indigo went commercial, but like SU there´s a free version also.

I also recommend http://www.thearender.com/cms/

Some cool points about TheaRender.

FAIR PRICE
Thea is built for the professional user but without an elitetargeted
price tag. It is affordable for one basic reason; we simply
enjoy working on creating a solid and elegant application in order
to meet your expectations.

VERSATILITY
Encapsulating more than one engine cores, your renders can be
as versatile as never before. Use fast photorealistic rendering for
animation or unbiased rendering for ultra-realism. Or bake
textures for your games and real-time architectural walkthroughs.
All these by a mature, stable and optimized renderer.

PHYSICALLY BASED RENDERING
From the basic materials up to the layer system and lights,
physical laws are obeyed, leading to superior render quality. The
incorporation of real data, such as material measurements and
industry standard lights, ensures that you will never need to think
or work in an “unnatural” way for your achievements.

PORTABILITY
The engine has been developed as platform and system
independent application with modern software architecture. The
application look and feel does not change when moving from
one operating system to another. You can simply connect
different systems for co-operative renders and take advantage of
unlimited memory usage and scripting automation.
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What is very COOL is that you can use Unbised and other biased techniques making it a hybrid of vray/mental ray and maxwell/fry etc..

Very appealing. Being able to stretch the bounds of reality if needed but at the same time being able to create physically based materials and lighting situations based on the visible spectrum and how we precieve light and materials.

Wow! Looks like Thearender has really developed tremendously since when I last tried an early version of Kerkythea. Good luck with this release. I am happy to see more competition to Maxwell and Fry in the unbiased market as they were holding too many of the cards. Now, at least there will be a few lower-priced options to balance the market... I already have Fry but very interested to see what Thearender can do. It's very interesting you mention it can perform a hybrid of biased and unbiased technologies. This can be very good! :) It can do this in single image? assignable to objects or by materials? It allows some ways to break physical rules? Can you post any links to images or discussions showing this?

Thanks,
jonah

>>>I am happy to see more competition to Maxwell and Fry in the unbiased market as they were holding too many of the cards.

My thought exact, I own Maxwell but I look for any excuse to press uninstall, Fry could have been the solution But no Mac or Linux support.

anyway you need to register just browse the thea forum (which a bit annoying) so here so of the images...





(unbiased) test render showing sun pool caustics (No other unbiased Render has a solution to this (yet)...)



Image Courtesy of notareal






Image Courtesy of Grzegorz Rakoczy



Image Courtesy of Jon Westwood



Image Courtesy of Alexandre Murat

nice images. the prism is beautiful. I did register already and poked around the forum a bit. Do you know if any of those images used biased features?

jonah

Dispersion examples are done in unbiased mode...not sure about the rest. Stay tuned they will be giving more info soon also making beta test calls.

Call for exporter/plugin developers

(Thea Render has reached a certain status in terms of stability and rendering capabilities and we would like now to call for exporter/plugin developers in order to help us expand our integrations with 3rd party software.

We are looking for developers that have some good familiarity with the plugin system of a modeling application and can maintain good communication during development.

We will be very pleased to hearing from you and discuss a potential co-operation.

If you are interested, send us an e-mail to contact[at]thearender.com.)
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jbshorty if you don't mind post that @ the Rhino Forum

MoI has no SDK so not point asking, But perhaps an exporter could do for now...

I just put together a list of features and posted the Rhino NG... I feel a little bit guilty, I downloaded Kerky a few years ago but made no attempts to learn it. I remember not feeling comfortable in the UI. But it looks like there are some really nice features hidden in there! Some things which other unbiased engines can't do... looking forward to hearing more info about Thea...

jonah

hi jonah, I much appreciate that. (I have also been using Rhino OS X for some time now and it looks like Ill be joying the Rhino universe soon).

one other thing is that the Thea developers don't want people to compare Thea to Kerkythea...(same people but new product).

[THEA RENDER is our next generation engine, operating in full visible spectrum and delivering highest quality
using state-of-the-art techniques and in-house R&D. It encapsulates the new technology in an advanced and
intuitive user interface written from scratch – to be integrated also as seamless plugin on most popular modelers.]

it's a parallel universe anyway, one I am afraid to venture to... :)