If you have used Thea to follow the examples in the book, you may wonder why you should choose a different rendering application when Thea can provide all of the features that you need to create photoreal renderings. In fact, there is no immediate need for you to use anything else, and this is exactly the reason why I picked Thea as the rendering software for this book.
With Thea Render you get the following features:
It provides easy-rendering modes for beginners but lets you tweak the render settings to improve the rendering time or achieve advanced effects as you become more experienced
At the beginning, you can download a number of high-quality materials from the website and experiment with the settings in the material lab when you have the need for more specialized materials
You can use the existing sun and sky models to create realistic lighting conditions or use HDRI images for specific atmospheres
There are advanced features (such as Relight or the Colimo interface) that can be useful for the presentation and evaluation of design options
You have the choice of using it entirely from SketchUp or as a standalone product with Thea Studio
I think that with these features, Thea Render has the common requirements of a rendering application well covered. However, other features are not present, and if you consider projects that require some of the following functionality, you should look at other packages:
Real-time rendering for interactive presentations
Physics and particle animations (for example, weather or crowd animation)
Advanced animation features such as inverse kinematics
The following table can serve as a quick reference guide for you and will answer some of your questions. It is not exhaustive, and our selection is more an overview of available technologies and features, than a representation of the current market in rendering software.
The following table guides you with the specifications of different rendering software:
