Thea for SketchUp is a state-of-the-art Biased, Unbiased and GPU renderer with a rich set of innovative features, a powerful material system and its own advanced studio, all-in-one. Thea Render comes with high quality materials, resources exclusively for licensed users, integration with various modelers, a robust SDK and advanced features such as Photometric Analysis, Colimo Support and many more.
The plugin is a fully integrated rendering environment that enables photorealistic and physically accurate renderings to be easily created directly inside SketchUp, eliminating the hassle of importing and exporting models. With a completely redesigned user interface and accessibility to multiple rendering engines, creating renderings with the appropriate look and feel is intuitive and efficient. And with CPU as well as GPU support, Thea runs effectively on any hardware configuration.
Offering the ultimate experience in usability and exceptional functionality, Thea Render 2.0 for SketchUp provides many new features including:
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- New user interface
- On-line material library
- Denoiser
- Tone Mapping
- Fog Medium
Section Cuts (New)
Section Cuts are now supported from SketchUp 2014 (up to the latest version). Section Cuts allow you to cut through buildings and rooms leaving the interior lighting the same, as the external walls would be still in place.
Interactive Render Overlay
Thea for SketchUp allows you to run an interactive render either inside Thea, or directly inside SketchUp view – a feature called Interactive Render Overlay. Additionally, with the use of Interactive Region Rendering, a desired part of the SketchUp view can be selected rendered providing ultra fast feedback for complex scenery. It is a valuable in the workflow as it gives you an immediate visualization of geometry modifications, environment, depth of field, reflections, light distribution, material properties and external Thea models in a scene.
External Models
High quality external Thea models can be inserted as an empty wireframe box. In a rendered image, they will be translated into very detailed originals. This allows an easy population of your model with impressive looking trees, grass, cars and detailed furniture. There are already a few libraries of render-ready objects.
Materials
Thea libraries can be found inside SketchUp Paint Bucket (in SketchUp Material format) and inside Content Browser for applying Thea materials easily and directly! The “Convert Thea Material(s) to SKM” tool helps you convert your own libraries. Licensed users can download additional libraries, in both Thea format and SketchUp materials format. You can even choose one of the available Thea material presets (they also come with useful parameters that let you adjust their properties).
Export to Studio
It is possible to export the scene to Thea Standalone Studio and take advantage of additional staging tools. Using the 64-bit Studio (currently available on Windows / Linux), you can render heavy scenery in very high resolutions without RAM limitations.
Animation
Thea for SketchUp is able to render animations as they are visible in the SketchUp view. All animation plugins that show their output directly in the SketchUp window, while a built-in scene animation is being played, are supported.
Channel
Many SketchUp users possess exceptional post-processing skills. Thea for SketchUp allows rendering a model with multiple images containing separate channels, popularly called “passes”. Those channels may include, for example, shadow, depth, direct light, transparency and reflection information. Combining them in an artistic way gives full control over the final image and lets you create otherwise hard-to-achieve effects.
Panoramic Images
You can render a model using a camera with spherical projection. The resulting image will be a panorama that can by viewed by an external program or a web application. It is especially useful for presenting interiors to clients as it gives an excellent impression of a proposed solution.