I see that Thea Render is both bias and unbiased renderer. What are the main differences between these methods? When should I use each one? Unbiased methods are techniques that do not introduce any bias into the radiance approximation. The unbiased engines should be preferred when one seeks maximum accuracy with the least possible effort in tuning the render engine (actually none). TR1 engine core should be preferred over TR2 for exteriors and general situations where direct lighting is dominant in the scene.

TR2 should be preferred on the other hand for difficult indirect lighting situations, such as indirect caustics (including 'sun - pool caustics' ). Please, note that the biased name may be somewhat misleading here, since all engines produce photorealistic renders. In the environment settings, for IBL (Image Based Lighting) there are four different categories. What are their purposes? By enabling IBL, you can use an image for lighting your scene and also add other images (maps) for your background, reflections and refractions of your scene. Note that you can use different maps to each slot for these four options, but If you only have a single HDRI and load it to the Illumination channel (and don't use any other images in the remaining channels (background, reflection and reflection channel ) Thea will use this HDRI from the illumination channel for all other channels too.

Encore electronics drivers. Thea Tool Window It allows setting up cameras, editing materials, placing and editing lights, exporting a scene to Thea Studio and defining other preferences. Thea Browser This button opens Thea Browser Window that helps with easy insert-ing Thea models, materials, skies and SketchUp components/proxies. Thea Main RENDERING Window.

Is Thea Render supporting clay render? Where are its settings?

Clay render is available in Thea Render. After setting up your scene, go to Render options, at Biased RT tab and enable the clay render option (choose also the percentage of reflectance you wish). Choose as render engine the Adaptive (BSD) and then go to Darkroom and start rendering. How can I get the alpha, normal, depth, material etc. Why some channels are in blue color? Is the reflection channel working under TR1?

First of all, in order to render specific channels (apart from the color channel, which is the default one) you need to enable them before rendering. You can find them at the Settings panel, at General tab. The buttons that are in blue color work only with Adaptive (BSD) engine. After rendering, in the Darkroom, you can select your desired channels from the drop down menu at the Channels option and save the corresponding image. Reflection channel only works with Adaptive (BSD) engine and in order to find the reflection channel after rendering, be sure at first that your image, has indeed reflection.

The option of choosing the day and the month at Location/Time tab of Sky settings, what format is using? The format is dd/mm/yyyy (day – month – year). When I use the Interactive Render (IR), I only see a black and white preview image.

Why is that happening? A possible explanation is that you may have enabled the CRF (Camera Response Function) option at the Display tab of Properties panel. From that menu you can select your desired preview according to desired camera. Some of them are black and white cameras resulting in the corresponding view effects. By disabling CRF, you can go back to normal mode of rendering view. I am trying to create a Depth of Field (DOF) effect. How can I do it?