Opinions on Redshift?

[jfharper]

I've heard good things about Redshift and was thinking of trying it, I currently use max 2016 and vrayrt and have been impressed with the speed and quality. I was wondering if Redshift is worth getting now, for the future. I'm mainly looking at animation rendering. What are your opinions on it? Does it suit your needs, or does it not yet stack up quality wise to vrayrt. I've seen some pretty good stuff done with it.

[Francisco Penaloza]

IMO Redshift does not lack in quality, actually I am pretty sure it can deliver as much as any other ray-tracer engine.

But, Redshift is new in Max, and V Ray has a vast experience and rich outside development ecosystem.

Unless Redshift can accept V Ray assets and transform them quickly like Corona render does, it will be a hard competition and hard for regular VRay users to do the switch. Imagine change all your assets now to a new render engine. That's a lot of time that I am not sure I would like to gamble just because.

I am trying Redshift my self and I really like it, I think is is way faster than VRay RT but of course depending of your hardware YMWV.

[jensandersen]

Have you tried Fstorm? It's in beta and only for 3ds max, but seems like there's a lot of hype to it atm. It's still free and I see great results from people already. It's material converter is also pretty good:

 

http://www.fstormrender.ru/

[jfharper]

Thanks, I hadn't seen that, but will give it a try.

[RyderSK]

Francisco mentioned maybe the best thing to consider with renderers these days, the whole 'ecosystem'. What does it matter if you can get 20perc. faster render if none of your plugins work (will ever work), and the only assets you can buy are single sofa and one planter ?

 

Redshift is pretty kickass, well designed renderer. F-storm not so much yet. Honestly I am fascinated by hype from people whose rendering is making single room with 5 assets and no commercial project in sight whatsoever. By a renderer that refuses to integrate normal maps because the developer thinks they are useless. With hilariously funny facebook group, something akin to Charles Manson's sect in his primetime :- ). I do honestly suggest anyone to have a look, then on the dev's responses in his forum (esp. the one towards Allegorithmic developer Nicholas) and make his mind how much he would trust this product's future ;- )

 

If you like VrayRT, stay with it. It's not the most complete solution, but when you fail to render your 20GB big scene because it doesn't fit into GPU vram, you can still fallback on cpu part with access to 8 bigger memory pool.

 

Also, unless you plan to buy bunch of 1080ti in January (or Titan-X Pascals now), both of which feature 12gb memory which I would consider bare minimum for any actual production rendering, then maybe do not switch yet.

[numerobis]

According to a post of the F-Storm developer he also has no intentions to support caustics.

 

(Maxwell will get GPU rendering next week - looking forward to buy some 1080 Ti, or maybe Titan Black later if there will be one)

Edited October 4, 2016 by numerobis