Altair (Nasdaq: ALTR), a global technology company providing solutions in simulation, high-performance computing (HPC), and artificial intelligence (AI), is pleased to announce the release of Thea Render version 3.0. Thea Render is the most versatile 3D-renderer featuring state-of-the-art, unbiased and graphics processing unit (GPU) engines. Thea Render engines – all of which operate within the same framework – significantly reduce rendering times and enable designers to focus on detailing photorealistic quality visualizations. Altair’s solution for innovative designers, architects, and digital artists to create, evaluate, and visualize designs faster than ever before is available for SketchUp, Rhino, and Altair Inspire Studio users.

“Thea Render’s new functionalities come with tremendous workflow enhancements and speed improvements, ensuring increased productivity for designers and architects applying our rendering engine,” said James Dagg, chief technical officer, Altair. “True to our commitment to an open architecture approach, we will continue to support all plug-ins for third-party design tools such as SketchUp and Rhino, as well as for our own design solution, Altair Inspire Studio. Thea Render also integrates the Intel Open Image Denoiser and the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit 11, which brings support for the NVIDIA Ampere architecture.”

“I use Thea Render for SketchUp daily as it allows me to render and visualize buildings very realistically, including lights, textures, effects, and more,” said Jean Thiriet, freelancer for architectural visualization. “For my work, the tight integration with both NVIDIA and Intel denoisers is the most important feature of the new release. It makes rendering significantly faster, almost real time, which is the holy grail for all users of architectural visualization tools. In addition, the link between Thea Render and SketchUp has also been improved, making it easier and faster to iterate designs.”

Thea Render version 3.0 highlights include:

• Adaptive Tracing – A technique that solves difficult lighting scenarios, such as caustics from point lights, sun pools, and diffuse interreflections. This results in images with a higher dynamic range and lighting effects that were previously impossible.
• Relight Editor – Allows users to create infinite images from a single render. When Relight is enabled, every light in the scene can be modified (intensity, color, and status) and different lighting setups can be created in post production. Every Relight setup can be saved in the Relight Editor panel as a Snap and then loaded back to the Darkroom for further editing or exported to an image file.
• Random Color Texture – A procedural texture that adds variation to instanced models and creates rich looking images for grass, bushes, trees, wooden floors, and more.
• Support for Intel® Open Image Denoiser – The Intel Open Image Denoiser is now available in Thea Render. The AI-accelerated denoiser provides high-quality, noise-free images and runs on a central processing unit (CPU).
• Interactive Denoising – Denoising with both Intel and NVIDIA AI denoisers is also supported during an interactive rendering session.
• Support for NVIDIA® CUDA® 11 – Thea Render uses the latest NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit, which introduces support for the NVIDIA Ampere architecture.

“Using NVIDIA GPUs to power these latest enhancements in Thea Render 3.0 enables the world-class speed and reliability required by users in interactive rendering sessions, providing near-instant feedback and rapid acceleration throughout the setup and design decision processes,” said Andrew Rink, global marketing strategy lead for AEC at NVIDIA. 

For more information regarding the plug-ins and to download a free trial of Thea Render 3.0, visit: https://www.thearender.com/.

About Altair (Nasdaq: ALTR)
Altair is a global technology company that provides software and cloud solutions in the areas of simulation, high-performance computing (HPC), and artificial intelligence (AI). Altair enables organizations across broad industry segments to compete more effectively in a connected world while creating a more sustainable future. To learn more, please visit www.altair.com.