Thea Render Changelogs | Updates & Latest Features

Thea for SketchUp v4.5

November 3, 2025

Parallax Occlusion Mapping
Add depth and detail that feels truly 3D—without compromising performance. Parallax Occlusion Mapping brings surfaces to life with subtle shadows and depth effects that react dynamically to light and camera movement. The result? A realistic effect that gives your renders a serious boost.

Focus to Object
Create cinematic animations effortlessly! Link your camera to any object and let Thea handle the focus automatically. Achieve smooth transitions and professional depth of field—without the hassle.

Sheen
Bring fabrics, dust, and rough materials to life with soft, diffused reflections. Sheen accurately simulates how light interacts with fine surface details, adding a subtle, natural glow to your renders.

Smart Resolution
Time is money! With Smart Resolution, you can render at a lower resolution first and then upscale to your final output in no time. Perfect for fast concept iterations without sacrificing visual quality.

Material Override (for Rhino)
Need to replace all materials with a uniform style in just a click? No problem! Material Override lets you give your entire scene a consistent look—or exclude specific objects for flexibility. Full control with minimal effort.

Interactive Glare
Adjust glow and glare in your scene in real time. The improved, faster glare editor provides instant feedback, so your lighting always looks just right.

Scatter: Remove Objects on Slopes
Create natural landscapes with realistic object distribution. Thea now automatically removes objects placed on steep slopes—ideal for forests, fields, or urban environments.

Bitmap & Tone Mapping Randomizations
Add variation effortlessly! The updated Nitro Editor now supports random bitmaps, tone mapping variance, and UV randomization. Every object gets a unique look—making your scenes more lifelike than ever.

Motion Vectors
Enjoy smoother animations and real-time feedback during rendering. With Motion Vectors, camera and object movements feel more fluid and responsive.

And there’s more…

Multiple base surfaces for Scatter
Shadows affecting the Alpha channel
Projector lights in Rhino
Finite Sphere support

Thea for SketchUp v4.0

December 16, 2024

Thea Render Nitro Engine
The all-new Nitro engine was built from scratch delivering phenomenal performance and interactivity. Taking advantage of hardware ray tracing cores the new engine is an order of magnitude faster than our Thea Render Presto engine and supports all modern NVidia, AMD and Intel discrete GPUs as well as Apple Silicon GPUs.

Scattering
Use the scatter tool to create grass fields and distribute plants, and trees.

Fur
Cover surfaces with fur strands to make rugs, cloth, and other items look more appealing.

Reworked User Interface
The user interface has been redesigned to improve the user experience. It is now fully integrated and available in both dark and light themes.

New Material Editor
A new PBR-compliant material definition is introduced that supports the metallic/roughness workflow.

Tone Mapping Variance
Bitmap tonemapping parameters such as saturation, hue, and gamma can be randomized to add variation to a scene using a single material.

Intel® Open Image Denoise (GPU Accelerated)
Nitro engine is making use of the latest GPU accelerated version providing stunning results and the ability to use it for interactive rendering.

Thea for SketchUp v3.5

March 23, 2022

UV Randomizer
UV Randomizer is an extra option in the Coordinates panel which helps in removing the repetition and randomizes the material for all instances sharing the same one. A good use case here is a parquet floor as seen in the following example.

Bitmap Randomizer
To make the UV Randomizer more powerful, Thea also introduced the Bitmap Randomizer option. Bitmap Randomizer provides an additional way to add variation to the scenes. You may now assign multiple bitmaps to a channel which will then be applied randomly to all instances sharing the same material.

One additional option with the Bitmap Randomizer is that the probability of each texture is now controlled by the weight percentage of each loaded bitmap. As one would expect, the Bitmap Randomizer is not limited to images but includes procedurals too. Finally, the Bitmap Randomizer can be combined with the UV Randomizer and create smart materials with small effort.

Random Glints
With the addition of Random Glints, it is easier than ever to create glittery surfaces containing small mirror-like flakes that react to the light. While this result can be achieved with the use of normal maps, the new feature is well integrated into the material setup workflow and can be turned on with a single click.

Substance 3D Materials Support
In version 3.5 of the Thea Render integrations, native support for Substance 3D materials has been added. There is no need to convert Substance 3D materials to Thea Materials since .sbsar files can now be opened from within the Thea material editor and get access to the Substance 3D parameters.

Global Coordinates
This workflow enhancement simplifies coordinate handling significantly. It eliminates the need to go through each bitmap of material individually, enabling simultaneous adjustments to all of them.

More Updates

SketchUp 2022 support (on macOS, M1 is not supported)
Intel Open Image Denoiser updated to v1.4.1 with improved fine detail preservation
Material Editor redesign
Smart coordinates synchronization (Helps with adjusting coordinates only in textures sharing the same values in the whole material.)
Point Light Intersection (Makes point lights visible when Soft Radius is enabled and speeds up caustics from highly reflective materials.)

Thea for SketchUp v3

March 15, 2021

Relight Editor
Relight allows the user to create infinite images from a single render. When Relight is enabled, every light in the scene can then be modified (intensity, colour and status) and different lighting setups in post-production. Every Relight setup can be saved in the Relight Editor panel as a Snapshot and then loaded back to the Darkroom for further editing or exported to an image file.

Intel® Open Image Denoiser
The Intel Open Image Denoiser is now integrated inside Thea Render. The AI-accelerated denoiser provides high-quality noise-free images and runs on the CPU.

Interactive Denoising
Denoising with both Intel’s and NVIDIA’s AI denoisers is also supported during an interactive rendering session.

Support for NVIDIA® CUDA® 11
Thea Render makes use of the latest NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit which introduces support for the NVIDIA Ampere architecture.

Adaptive Tracing
Adaptive Tracing is a technique that solves difficult lighting scenarios, such as caustics from point lights, sun pool caustics and diffuse interreflections. This results in images with a higher dynamic range and lighting effects that were previously impossible.

Random Color Texture
Random colour is a procedural texture that can be used to add variation to your instanced models and create rich-looking images for grass, bushes, trees, wooden floors and more.

Local Proxy Material Editing
The Thea Proxy materials can now be edited with the Material Editor with a click of a button.

Better Refresh of High-Resolution Production Renders
High-resolution images refresh now faster without locking the interface.

Optimized Glare
Glare is now multithreaded and CPU/GPU accelerated, making it a lot faster.

Faster Interactive Scene Ipdates
Geometry-heavy scenes perform faster during interactive rendering and object translation is now a lot faster.

More Updates

Support for Lindalë Skatter™ v2
Out-of-core Rendering
Multithreaded export
HDR Region Render
Enhanced Channels
Improved interactiveness
UI Improvements

Thea for SketchUp v2.1

June 12, 2019

This update contains the following improvements:

Performance boost for Thea Render Presto engine showing accumulated performance improvement up to 2x faster;
Beveled Edges can be used to smooth out the edges of an object, allowing you to create more photorealistic renderings, without the need to model detailed curved edges;
Triplanar Mapping, the texture is mapped three times along each of the three axes with smooth blending between the sides. This creates seamless results for non-UV mapped meshes;
Worley Noise used to easily create cell-like structures that simulate textures of water and stone among others;
Edge Ramp procedural makes it possible to apply color to the edges of a surface based on the minimum angle of adjacent faces and the radius of the edges;
And much more…

Thea for SketchUp v2

July 9, 2018

Denoiser
Optix Denoiser from NVIDIA to remove noise from renders.

Integrated Material Editor
Adjust advanced material setting right within the Thea toolbar.

Modular User Interface
Set up your workspace for the Thea window. You decide which toolboxes will be shown at which place.

Tone Mapping
Several tone mapping options to restore the lighting balance and therewith certain details in your scenes.

And Much More…

Built-in online material library
Render Nodes for networked rendering
AMD GPU for Mac OpenCL
CUDA 9