Thea for Cinema 4D is the perfect companion for Cinema 4D users who want the highest quality photorealistic rendering inside their modeling application. The plugin offers a list of advanced tools while being actively developed to meet the most demanding visualization requirements.

Content Browser with Online Repository

The Content Browser makes it easier to add materials and HDR images in the scene. Materials can either be applied to selected objects or added to the material manager.

Adding HDR images in the scene is easier since skies are now being added as a Sky object with a Thea Sky tag already assigned to it.

It is also possible to add your own local folders in the Custom Folders area.

Thea Shaders

In v2.0, the Thea Material Editor is fully integrated inside Cinema 4D. Thea Shaders can be helpful to make it easier to apply tonemapping and modify the texture coordinates for every bitmap and also add advanced procedurals like Fresnel Ramp.

Backface Material Support

With the Backface material support, it is now possible to create material like, sheets of paper, labels, leaves, etc.

It is integrated inside Cinema 4D supporting the Front & Back side option of the Texture tag.

Speed Optimizations

Every transfer including geometries, lights, shaders, and instances is now multi-threaded and at least two times faster than v1.5.

On top of that, once the scene has been rendered once, Thea for Cinema 4D will only transfer the changes to the engine, speeding up this way the transferring process.

A speed increase has also been achieved for the Texture Baking process. This process has to do with the conversion of any non-supported shader by Thea.

More features…

  • Instancing Support

    Cinema 4D offers various ways of instancing and we have paid attention to support them all, matching the native renderer. Whether you are using MoGraph cloners, arrays or render instances, the result will be always as it should be.

  • Animation

    Thea Render can handle the animation rendering inside Cinema 4D and render all the frames out of the box. Furthermore, by supporting Team Render, one can distribute these frames over the network for ultra-fast animation sequence rendering. Accurate Motion Blur is fully supported for any animation produced in Cinema 4D (Camera, Mograph, Particle Emitters, Dynamics, e.t.c).

  • Render Channels

    Thea Render supports a big variety of render channels such as Normal, Depth, Alpha, Ambient Occlusion, Shadow and many more. These channels can be used to add various post process effects on the final rendered image

  • Supported Plugins

    Thea for Cinema 4D can be used along with several third-party Cinema 4D plugins in order to make workflow much easier for the end user. Among them, Thea Render is working with: Laubwerk, Forester, X-Particles, HDR Light Studio, and ThinkBox Deadline.

— Interface improvements & simplifications.
— Seen by Rays & Seen by Camera options.
— Point Lights (Omni, Spot, IES)
— 32-bit support in Picture Viewer FEATURES LIST...

User Showcase

Have a look at what our users are creating with Thea for Cinema 4D.
  • Hover by Zoran Gorski
  • Eternity Design by George Drakakis
  • Aviator House by Zoran Gorski

System Requirements

MacOSX

MacOSX 10.9 or above, Intel SSE3 CPU (or compatible)

for Presto GPU *
Nvidia CUDA Graphics Card (Compute Capability 2.x/3.x/5.x/6.x/7.0) with latest CUDA and web graphics driver

Cinema 4D R16 and above

* Note that support for OSX 10.14 (Mojave) is currently pending due to driver incompatibility.

Windows

Windows 7/8/10 64-bit, Intel SSE3 CPU (or compatible)

for Presto GPU
Nvidia CUDA Graphics Card (Compute Capability 2.x/3.x/5.x/6.x/7.0/7.5) with latest graphics driver
or
AMD Graphics Card (Hawaii, Tahiti, Pitcairn, Capeverde, Bonaire) with latest OpenCL and graphics drivers

Cinema 4D R16 and above