An Acer laptop as rendered in Thea Render. (Image courtesy of Solid Iris Technologies and Jon Westwood.)
Over the past few years, Altair has been using Thea Render technology to provide photorealistic rendering to its product conceptualization tool solidThinking Evolve.
However, in its latest move, Altair has decided to bring Thea Render in house, most likely to have greater control over how Thea Render is diversified across other CAD and CAE disciplines.
While at the CONVERGE 2016 conference, Altair representatives also hinted that thanks to this acquisition, more of Solid Iris’ rendering technologies could be added into Evolve, allowing for even more materials to be rendered.
According to James R. Scapa, Altair’s founder, chairman and CEO, “With the continued growth in performance and cloud availability of high-performance computing, the opportunity to deliver rendering solutions for applications from architectural visualization and product design to entertainment and augmented reality is truly exciting. We look forward to delivering powerful new capabilities to our software community of designers and engineers.”
The Thea Render package creates photorealistic images through the use of a well-honed and realistic material system, an advanced lighting and environment studio and three modes of rendering—biased, unbiased and GPU rendering. While at CONVERGE 2016, Altair representatives also explained that the rendering software utilizes real-world optical physics when producing its images. Thea’s biased render engine allows designers to resolve renders faster because it uses interpolation schemes to limit how light interacts with objects in a scene.
The software’s unbiased engine is best used for final renders, as it will sample all lighting conditions in a scheme, creating a truly photorealistic glimpse of a digital product. Finally, Thea’s GPU render gives users the ability to max out the potential of their onboard resources to produce high-quality renders in the shortest possible time.
With software like SOLIDWORKS, Inventor and Fusion 360, among others, all incorporating powerful rendering tools, the writing appears to be one the wall. Photorealist rendering has become an important part of the design and product review process. In the future, thanks to a growing abundance of computing resources, immersive photorealistic rendering might define the CAD environment rather than being another component of a software.
That sentiment is echoed by Inonnis Pantazopoulos, managing director of Solid Iris: “Vision is the most important human sense, and it plays a vital role in our understanding of the world. As we fully integrate our team and technology within Altair, we are committed to advancing the user’s experience such that product creation will seem to occur inside a real scene rather than in front of a computer screen.”
To learn more about Evolve, read “Hybrid Modelling Software Offers Freedom and Precision.”