| Although the materials are the key to making highly realistic renders, the lighting used is the key to actually reveal all attributes of these materials in the renders. A rich and complex lighting usually corresponds to the frequency content and intensity variance. Such complex lighting can be created by capturing environment illumination (with a camera) and creating a high dynamic range image. This image can then be used as a lighting source in our virtual environment.
Thea Render supports image-based lighting for any kind of mesh acting as varying color and power texture. Even more, images can be used replicating the surrounding (environmental) lighting. Additionally, special extra images can be used for reflection, refraction and background mapping to boost further the appearance of your scene.
Well known high dynamic range formats HDR and OpenEXR are supported as input for image-based lighting. They are also supported as saving formats for renders that can be subsequently used as lighting sources. |
| Sometimes geometric complexity can be a limiting factor for the realism in our renders. Hard edges and low-poly objects can contribute to the sense of an unrealistic render. The usual way to increasing geometric details is by means of modeling and object subdivision. But this can be a tedious process, also making the scene quite heavy to manage. Displacement mapping is an effective way for leveraging geometric complexity with low impact on system memory resources.
Thea Render supports micro-displacement mapping as part of the material description. The necessary computations involved take place during rendering (on the fly) keeping the scene light, i.e. memory demands are minimal. It is tunable, well integrated into the material editor and of course joy to play with! |
| It is typical that cameras (and the human eye as well) can not take an instant photo of the environment. Between the time that the diaphragm opens until it closes again, the lighting enters through camera lens and hits the film (or CCD array in digital cameras). During this time, known as shutter time, objects are still moving in the scene and this movement can be captured on film - an effect called motion blur. The faster the motion compared to shutter time, the more obvious will be the effect.
Thea Render supports accurate motion blur by treating time as a parameter of the global illumination problem. This means that no matter how small or big is the motion of the object, the blur will appear correctly just like in using a real camera.
Even more, the studio application supports editing of rigid object animation using key frames, making the effect easy to appear. Shutter time and other parameters of the cameras can be setup easily in the user interface as well. |
| Real world cameras can not take photos keeping every object in the scene sharply defined. Due to the thin lens used for capturing and focusing the light on the film (or CCD for digital cameras), a tiny point-like object in the real world projects on an approximate circle on the image plane (known as circle of confusion in photography). This circle has a varying size depending on the camera and relative object position. Objects that are on the right distance (the focused distance) and between some limits (which are called near and far plane) are projected with a minimal circle of confusion and stay sharp and well defined on the image. Objects that are closer or further than this distance become blurry on the image; the more the distance, the blurrier these objects will be.
Thea Render supports thin lens cameras with similar settings (f-number and diaphragm) to a real world camera. Even more, auto-focus and visual setup of near and far planes can be done through the user interface. This means fast depth of field setup and better looking images. Depth of field is computed right out of the box for all render engines; it is not computed as post-process but integrated directly in the render engines resulting in truly accurate depth of field.
Depth of field can be used to effectively guide viewer attention to certain parts of the image. By making sharp some parts and blurry some other parts of the image, you can indirectly define those that are most important to notice. |
| Sub-surface scattering (SSS) refers to objects where light may enter from one point, have one or more scattering events and exit at another point on the surface. It can be considered as a special case of volumetric scattering. Thea Render comes with a special model that contains all the used surface and media parameters together. Strictly using the most accurate model, you can create astonishingly realistic materials, ranging from milk and marble to plastics, that are only approximate in other high-end unbiased renderers. Since Thea Render supports volumetric scattering, sub-surface scattering is supported out of the box (in unbiased mode). An approximate solution is available with the biased engine of Thea Render to yield fast results.
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