Author Topic: Why is Redshift so popular?  (Read 49336 times)

2017-11-05, 13:48:50

lupaz

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Hey guys,

Redshift is coming across often for some reason that I cannot figure out.
Even if it’s the fastest render engine, the images I’ve seen are far from realistic looking. They look like made with vray 1.

Does anyone know what’s the buzz around it for?

2017-11-05, 17:44:28
Reply #1

Juraj

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That's rather under-selling it.

Judging by what pictures ? The whole Blizzard Cinematics team is using it to produce absolutely amazing...Blizzard level quality.

I've played with Redshift about year ago and some of my observances:

-It's actually fast GPU renderer. That cannot be said about any other GPU renderer on the market, Redshift really is ahead, massively. But it has drawbacks of course, that speed is either at expense of GI (using general brute force), or quality/precision because you have to use (or rather, have the option to use) Irradiance caching for interiors. I presume some of those IR renders can resemble old Vray renders because it's the same underlying tech.
-It had great PBR shader from second version, and also supported Arnold's AlShader at same time. That's two industry level PBR shaders at same time with all the nice things to boot (correct fresnel, multiple BRDFs like GGX and Oren-Nayar)
-It was the first (and still the only?) GPU renderer capable of out-of-core rendering, cycling the limited GPU's memory buffers. This is massive limitation for big productions.

It's basically GPU speeded up Arnold for the masses. More than well deserving its praise imho :- ).

Now there are renderers running almost purely on hype and strangely religious cargo-culting, but Redshift is not among them.
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2017-11-05, 18:39:42
Reply #2

lupaz

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Thank you Juraj.
My comment about vray 1 was as a joke, implying that the quality of the image feels a step backwards compared to Corona.
I understand what you say. Big productions benefit from those advantages. But for the individual artist, other than speed... I would assume they'd choose realism over technical benefits. In this sense another advantage has to be ease of use I imagine.

It also seems to be popular among game artists and NPR rendering artists. Not so much architectural, no?



2017-11-05, 21:08:20
Reply #3

racoonart

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Imho the reason why Redshift is basically non-existent in archviz is simply because they haven't tried to get into that market yet. Redshift currently is a vfx renderer, and that's very apparent. I have spent quite some time just last week to test it out and I'm really impressed so far. However it's NOT a corona. Not in terms of ease-of-use and not in terms of archviz-oriented features. I don't share the opinion about GI (you can use the same methods as in vray/corona, it appears to be pretty solid actually, for interiors as much as everything else) but there are some features a lot of corona users will have a hard time to get used to - like defaults that are optimized for speed, not realism. Secondary rays for example are aggressively clamped by default (but you can set it higher or disable it of course). I also don't think the "quality" is a step backwards. Afaik there is no technical reason why redshift wouldn't be able to achieve as realistic renderings as corona (apart from the yet missing raytraced SSS, the point based one they have is pretty nice however).
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.

2017-11-06, 09:55:05
Reply #4

Juraj

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When I used brute-force on Interiors, it was slower and way noisier than Corona, but it was year ago, perhaps it did improve massively since, which I could see happening.
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2017-11-06, 11:08:07
Reply #5

racoonart

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I was actually quite surprised. I'm not rendering many interiors, so you'll have way better scenes to test with than I do, but the ones I tried were quite good. However it's relatively easy to oversample with redshift, so you have to make sure you setup the GI samples and the universal sampling settings correctly. A "simple" cathedral test I did a while ago: https://www.facebook.com/martin.geupel/posts/10207971459843258
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.

2017-11-06, 11:32:29
Reply #6

Juraj

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Ok, your test fared much better ! That's a very good scene to test.

I did play a lot about the settings, as I am confident I understood the whole sampling engine with old 2.4+ Vray rather good as well. Perhaps it has to do that my 20c/40th workstation was simply ahead of single Maxwell Titan-X.

But if that's the result a single 1060 can get..I can only imagine how happy are the people with 6x1080Ti, something not too problematic to built if it's your primary workstation and node at same time.

Actually makes me bit jealous too..
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2017-11-06, 13:39:35
Reply #7

lupaz

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I'd love to have it as my shading mode directly on the viewport. It seems we're getting there in terms of speed.

2017-11-06, 14:55:59
Reply #8

lupaz

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When I used brute-force on Interiors, it was slower and way noisier than Corona, but it was year ago, perhaps it did improve massively since, which I could see happening.

I was just trying the demo and yes, I feel it is like you say.
Corona seems to be faster on interiors, especially having the denoiser.

The real time experience in Corona seems to cover more features. I have to refresh the VFB in redshift somtimes.

But on exteriors it's blazing fast. It'd be nice to have for exterior massive animations.

The best of all is the fact that is GPU based. My system runs so silent with it. But then there's Octane and Fstorm...

I hope Corona GPU is in the making.

2017-11-06, 17:13:36
Reply #9

Nejc Kilar

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When I used brute-force on Interiors, it was slower and way noisier than Corona, but it was year ago, perhaps it did improve massively since, which I could see happening.

Did you use BF / BF or did you do some extra "bias" magic with the second solver?
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2017-11-06, 17:32:08
Reply #10

Juraj

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You know what, I feel like testing it again :- ).
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2017-11-06, 19:21:07
Reply #11

Nejc Kilar

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You know what, I feel like testing it again :- ).

Zhiyao Chen provided a cool and practical scene for testing on his blog -> http://zchen.ca/gpu/

Don't forget to report in with the findings :)
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2017-11-06, 20:47:28
Reply #12

Philip kelly

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To be honest, if you had €5,000 to spend on graphics cards it might be work using as a a production tool.
But for large Arch jobs all the GPU setups are not usable.
Main Model, trees, railclone, cars, HD maps...........




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2017-11-06, 23:11:47
Reply #13

lupaz

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To be honest, if you had €5,000 to spend on graphics cards it might be work using as a a production tool.
But for large Arch jobs all the GPU setups are not usable.
Main Model, trees, railclone, cars, HD maps...........

Not sure I understand. Do you mean that memory wouldn't be enough?

2017-11-07, 06:29:22
Reply #14

dfcorona

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To be honest, if you had €5,000 to spend on graphics cards it might be work using as a a production tool.
But for large Arch jobs all the GPU setups are not usable.
Main Model, trees, railclone, cars, HD maps...........

Not sure I understand. Do you mean that memory wouldn't be enough?

Yes, one of the main reason why I switched from GPU to CPU (Corona) renderer :)
can' t go back to GPU. I would rather do a primary/secondary rendering choice and use Corona as my primary one for complexe or big projects the VRAM limitation is nothing compared to GPU. 

Right now, the main problem is : you can buy as much 1080ti (11gb VRAM I think let's say 4 of them, so 44gb you will say? Well, not even close, it will be using 11gb. And some renderers are even worst in term of VRAM limitation : let's say you have a GTX 970 4gb and a 1080ti 11gb, the renderer will use the lowest VRAM (4gb) and not use the 11gb.
you switched from GPU renderer to CPU because of vram limitation, I can see this with octane or vray RT, but Redshift is a different animal. It can handle insanely large scenes compared to other GPU renderers.