Render Farm

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Oh I see. Yes, I agree with everything you said. I also use a Chief to Thea workflow. The only thing I would add is that the Chief Models are triangulated and not subdivided quads. So I don’t think displacement maps are going to work very well generally. Or, have you found a solution for this in either Thea or Blender?

As to your renderfarm question I have not. There may be someone here that has. Hopefully they will chime in.

You must also be aware of the new GPU/multi GPU rendering engines in Thea but not everything is supported at this point.

Yeah, should be much faster once Multi-GPU rendering is fully supported. For other work I do that requires high volume data computation we are now switching over to GPU processing for statistical analysis and it is amazing how fast it is for parallel processes. It seems odd to many people that even with 32Gb the RAM is still the bottleneck and results in process crashes due to the intense memory loads. To prevent crashes we had to start pushing more data into the SSD, but of course that slowed things down quite a bit. The only way to get where we need to be from here is either a large server with MUCH more RAM and many more cores or switch to GPU computing.

Re: triangular tessellation...

All the better that CA chose game optimized meshes. Triangulated meshes are less resource intensive so if I don't want a photo real render, I can use the internal tools to get one that is good enough in a short time frame. I think most users appreciate that about CA and there are only a relative few who are willing to put in the time for photo-realism. But for those who are, yes there is a solution in Blender now that is easier than ever. Export your model as simply as you can, turning off all unnecessary objects. I only mention that because I forget sometimes and it makes the following process much harder. Anyway, if you have X6, export your model in COLLADA format. This format works TONS better than the older workaround of trying to export in 3DS and VRML and go through sketchup and stuff (although sometimes I still do go through sketchup for various reasons which makes the fact that we can export COLLADA now all the more awesome). Anyway, Blender can import directly in .dae so the process is easier now, and my imports look much better than they used to going the 3DS, VRML, DXF route. Once imported your model might have two versions of the model, a faced mesh and an edge/vertices mesh. If the latter exists, you need to get rid of it by either moving it to a different layer or deleting it. From there you have 1-3 steps depending on how much time you want to spend.

1--Select all faces (or only the ones you need) and use Blender's auto convert tool. mesh >> faces >> convert triangles to quads This will convert from triangles to polygons which makes the displacement map better for sure, but doesn't allow very good editing of the model if you need to. But if that gets you there in one step, all the better.

2--Square up the polygons. Even though you already have polygons instead of triangles, editing and maps are better with squares than with trapezoids. Select edges where necessary and subdivide them, adding additional vertices at right angles to other vertices allowing you to create squares and rectangles after you've relocated the edges again.

3--If you want to go even further you can simplify the new square quads even further by eliminating unnecessary ones and cleaning things up a bit.

Once you've got the workflow down, it goes pretty quick. You can now use Crazybump to its full potential. Blender is great for puting together an exterior and landscape but you should use Thea as a render engine and Crazybump for maps.