RedShift 2 plugins + RLM Setup Tutorial Download

Biased Rendering

Redshift is a biased renderer.  Redshift uses approximation and interpolation techniques to achieve noise-free results with relatively few samples, making it much faster than unbiased rendering.

Redshift supports several biased global illumination techniques including:

• Brute Force GI
• Photon Mapping (with Caustics)
• Irradiance Cache (similar to Irradiance Map and Final Gather)
• Irradiance Point Cloud (similar to Importons and Light Cache)

You choose the techniques that work best for your particular scene.

Out-of-Core Architecture

Redshift uses an out-of-core architecture for geometry and textures, allowing you to render massive scenes that would otherwise never fit in video memory.

A common problem with GPU renderers is that they are limited by the available VRAM on the video card – that is they can only render scenes where the geometry and/or textures fit entirely in video memory.  This poses a problem for rendering large scenes with many millions of polygons and gigabytes of textures.

With Redshift, you can render scenes with tens of millions of polygons and a virtually unlimited number of textures with off-the-shelf hardware.

Proxies and Instances

Redshift supports geometry instancing allowing you to render massive scenes with large numbers of repeating objects, like grass or trees, efficiently with almost no memory overhead.

Redshift also supports render proxies which allow you to place previously exported geometry in your scene but loading into memory only at render time when it is needed.  With proxies, you can render scenes that would otherwise not even load in the host DCC application.  Like regular geometry, Redshift proxies can be instanced, making rendering scenes with billions of instanced polygons possible.

1-Click Progressive Rendering

Redshift provides a progressive rendering mode that allows you to conveniently and interactively preview your scene without waiting for GI prepasses.  This mode uses progressive refinement to give you draft quality results almost immediately while continuously refining the quality over time.

Powerful Shading and Texturing

Redshift uses a flexible node-based shader system supporting complex shading networks.  With support for surface, photon, environment, light and lens shaders, as well as a variety of BRDF lighting models, Redshift gives you the power and flexibility to achieve photorealistic results or highly stylized effects.

When photorealism is your goal, Redshift provides physically correct surface shaders, physically correct lights, photometric (IES) lights, and a physical sun & sky system.

Sampling Optimizations

Redshift includes several optimizations that help you achieve noise-free results without sacrificing performance by automatically adjusting the number of samples used throughout the renderer based on a variety of heuristics.

The net result is that more samples are taken where they are needed and fewer samples are taken when they yield little benefit.

Keep Working While You Render

Because Redshift runs on the GPU with minimal CPU usage, your machine remains responsive while you render.

Tight DCC integration

Redshift seamlessly translates the geometry, cameras, lights, materials and other relevant properties of the host application, minimizing the learning curve.  Redshift runs directly within the host DCC applications, so you can use Redshift just like you would the native renderer of the DCC.

Redshift currently includes plug-in integration with Autodesk Maya (2012 and higher), Autodesk Softimage (2011 and higher) and Autodesk 3dsMax (2013 and higher) running on Windows 64-bit (XP and higher) and Linux 64-bit (glibc 2.12 and higher).

Redshift also includes plug-in integration with SideFX Houdini (R14.0, R15.0, R15.5 and R16) running on Windows 64-bit (XP and higher) and Linux 64-bit (glibc 2.12 and higher).

Hardware Compatibility

Redshift requires an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA compute capability 2.0 or higher and 1GB VRAM or more.

You can determine the compute capability of your NVIDIA GPU by visiting https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus.

OpenCL support is planned for a future release.