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REDSHIFT

The world’s first fully GPU-accelerated, biased renderer.

Artist: Jessica Hewitt

WHAT’S NEW

Maxon’s GPU-accelerated renderer Redshift 2025 continues to expand the creative horizons of users, enabling them to use the full power of virtually any GPU or CPU for both photorealistic and non-photorealistic rendering. Additionally, Redshift GPU is now included with every new subscription of Cinema 4D. Toon rendering now offers a global contour option that allows line drawing to be easily applied to an entire scene, while also allowing users to define the look of toon lines and shading more precisely. Additional improvements to Redshift 2025 include an option to use procedural shaders as the input for Sprites and a new Volume Depth AOV pass to aid in compositing clouds, smoke and explosions. Additionally, Easy Brute Force caustics enables users to easily set up beautiful, realistic patterns of light passing through glass, gems, and other translucent surfaces.

GPU-ACCELERATED
Redshift is a powerful GPU-accelerated renderer, built to meet the specific demands of contemporary high-end production rendering. Tailored to support creative individuals and studios of every size, Redshift offers a suite of powerful features and integrates with industry standard CG applications.

ORE PRODUCTION STRENGTH
Redshift has the features and uncompromising quality of a CPU renderer, but at GPU rendering speeds. Unlike other GPU renderers out there, Redshift is a biased renderer that allows the user to adjust the quality of individual techniques in order to get the best performance/quality balance for their production.

PHOTOREALISM
Redshift’s out-of-the-box functionality provides the essentials for delivering photorealistic results, and its RenderView Interactive Preview Region makes it a breeze to tweak settings and get immediate results. In fact, artists can make adjustments more or less in real time.

SHADING & TEXTURE
Redshift supports complex, advanced shading networks and texturing capabilities as required for production-quality rendering.

CHARACTER
Every artist wants their renders to look great, but also need results quickly because faster rendering means more time to be creative and deliver client revisions. There are many amazing renderers out there that can bring your 3D creations to life, but only Redshift consistently delivers both breathtaking speed and remarkable imagery.

INTEGRATIONS
Redshift supports the industry’s most popular 3D applications, offering seamless integration into your production pipeline. Redshift standalone supports all integrations – you can jump between any of the supported applications without any additional cost for each integration.

REQUIREMENTS
Looking for information regarding operating system requirements and compatibility?

LEARN MORE

FORUM
Visit our Redshift forum to find answers to common questions or pose a question to the community.

REDSHIFT FORUM

Features

Out of core geometry and textures

Redshift’s efficient memory management allows rendering of scenes containing hundreds of millions of polygons and TBs of texture data.

Global Illumination

Achieve blazingly fast indirect lighting using biased point-based GI techniques, as well as brute-force GI.

World-leading performance

Harnessing the raw power of the GPU and using intelligent sampling techniques makes Redshift the worlds fastest renderer.

Proxies

Artists can export groups of objects to Redshift Proxy files which can be easily referenced by other scenes and allow powerful shader overrides.

Transformation and deformation blur

Redshift supports multi-step transformation blur and 2-step deformation blur.

Volumetric Rendering

Render realistic clouds, smoke, fire and more with Redshift’s Volumetric Rendering.

Hair rendering with ‘Min Pixel Width’

Thin hair can produce noisy renders. Redshift supports ‘MPW’ rendering which smooths out the look of thin and hard-to-sample hairs.

Tessellation and displacement

Redshift’s tessellation supports edge and vertex creasing with separate UV smoothing control.

Per-object flexibility

Objects have advanced matte features and tracing options such as self-shadowing and primary/secondary ray visibility.

Baking

Redshift allows for any type of AOV data to be baked out from individual objects.

Command-line rendering

Users can export their scene and render it independently of their 3D app using the redshiftCmdLine tool.

SDK

A C++ SDK is available for studios that require deeper integration of Redshift with their pipelines.

Denoising

AI-powered Denoising is a cheat-code for quicker renders, and Redshift offers three great solutions depending on your system and use case.

Redshift CPU

Redshift CPU offers an interactive experience when developing your project, and perfect compatibility with high-performance Redshift GPU rendering.

Distorter Node

The Distorter shader can be used to drive distortion of the UV space for a material according to texture or shader input.

MatCap Shader Node

Quickly create stylized, non-photo-real materials by mapping an image onto a mesh.

Jitter Node

Automatically apply color variation across a large number of objects with the same material applied.

Physically Based Materials

Flexible, production-ready shader, compatible with PBR workflows of Allegorithmic Substance and Unreal Engine.

Ray switches

Control how materials behave for certain ray types. Useful for customizing GI or double-sided polygon shading.

Hair shader

Accurately simulates light scattering off of and in hair with a physically principled model, yet offering artist-friendly controls.

Dedicated skin shaders

Support for up to 3 layers of sub-surface scattering in a single shader for realistic looking skin.

Round corners

Get smooth edges without requiring geometry tessellation. This technology is licensed from NVidia.

Displacement mapping with ‘auto-bump’

Add geometric and lighting detail to surfaces using displacement mapped height, vector textures or procedural shading nodes.

No texturing limitations

Virtually unlimited number and size of textures regardless of VRAM. Built-in efficient UDIM/UVTile tiling support.

Powerful shading attributes

Shaders can access per-vertex (weight maps, multiple UVs, etc) or per-object attributes for maximum flexibility.

Sprite node

Render foliage and other opacity-cutout effects blazingly fast!

Large variety of nodes

Redshift supports many dcc shading nodes for math, color ramps, color remaps and conversion, gamma and many others.

Standard Surface

Redshift’s Standard Surface offers incredible realism with intuitive controls. Create surfaces and translate materials from rendering systems easily.

Tile and Brick Shaders

Lay bricks faster than any stone mason with Cinema 4D’s popular Tile and Brick Shaders.

PRG Clear Sky

The new PRG Clear Sky model allows artists to simulate gorgeous sunsets with Redshift’s improved Sun and Sky.

Flakes Shader

The new Flakes Shader generates voronoi- or dot- shaped flakes at random angles and surface depth to add the perfect detail and shine to your renders.

Dome lights

Efficiently light an entire scene using image-based environment textures.

Mesh lights

Use any mesh in the scene as a light source, with the same features and sampling efficiency as regular area lights.

Volumetric lighting

Redshift lights can affect atmospheric volumetric fogging for the popular ‘God ray’ effect.

Physical sun and sky

Natural-looking physical sun light and sky emulation.

Physically correct lights

Full flexibility ranging from area lights to photometric/IES lights, ‘portal’ lights and texture-projected ‘gobos’.

Multiple camera lens types

Fisheye, spherical, cylindrical cameras, lens distortion.

VR

Stereo Spherical rendering for VR applications.

Physical lens effects

Familiar photographic exposure controls such as ISO, shutter, vignette, color balance and textured bokeh depth-of-field.

Deep and Layered EXR support

For 3D compositing and efficient management of AOVs.

Many AOV Types

Material shading components (albedo, diffuse, reflections etc), depth, motion vectors, puzzle-matte and many more.
BLENDER

Blender

Support for Blender, an open source 3D creation suite.

 KATANA

Foundry – Katana

Support for Katana, a lookdev and lighting management tool from Foundry.
CINEMA 4D

Mograph Cloner

Extensive support for Cinema 4D’s geometry objects including Instances, Generators, Deformers, Cloners and MoGraph objects.

 CINEMA 4D

Particle Instancing

Support for powerful built-in particle instancing and per-particle attributes.
CINEMA 4D

Redshift Viewport Preview (C4D)

Redshift’s Node-Based materials look great in the viewport, thanks to improved support for previewing textures.

 CINEMA 4D

Redshift Exchange Support (C4D)

We’ve added support for exporting common material attributes and textures from Redshift materials to FBX and USD.
CINEMA 4D

Pavement Shader

Redshift’s Pavement Shader gives you the power to generate cracked pavement, flagstone mosaic patterns and more.

 CINEMA 4D

Camera Backplates

Camera Backplates are now available in Redshift for C4D, offering amazing compositing control.
ZBRUSH

ZBrush

This first step of Redshift integration into ZBrush delivers new workflows to render images with subsurface scattering and emissive light generation.

 HOUDINI

Hair and Fur

Support of the Houdini curve primitives, that are extracted as efficient Redshift hair objects.
HOUDINI

Houdini primitives

Automatic and configurable tessellation of the Houdini primitive surfaces (primitives, nurbs, etc.).

 HOUDINI

Volumes

Direct rendering of OpenVDB files and the Houdini Volume and VDB primitives. Support of volume instancing and velocity grids.

HOUDINI

Strands

Render of any kind of Houdini primitive as Redshift strands.

 HOUDINI

Instancing and particles

Support of Houdini instancing, including the Instance OBJ node, and the “instance” and “instancepath” attributes.

HOUDINI

Non-GUI Tools

The plugin is compatible with all the Houdini non-GUI tools and includes a set of custom HScript commands to control the renderer.

 3DS MAX

Forest Pack

Support for the world’s most popular scattering plug-in.

3DS MAX

Ornatrix Max

Support for the super popular hair, fur and feathers plug-in for 3ds Max.

 3DS MAX

Hair Farm

Support for the precise and powerful hair modeling 3ds Max plug-in.

MAYA

Instancer

Support for Autodesk’s extension for node managing instances of scene objects created by a MASH network.

 MAYA

XGen

Support for Autodesk’s own geometry instancer for Maya.
MAYA

Ornatrix Maya

Support for the super popular hair, fur and feathers plug-in for Maya.

 MAYA

PL Yeti

Support for the popular fur, hair and feathers tool-set for Maya.
MAYA

Joe Alter

Support for Shave and a Haircut the veteran Maya hair and fur plugin.

 MAYA

Golaem

Support for the popular crowd simulation software for Maya.
REDSHIFT REQUIREMENTS

Operating Systems

  • Microsoft Windows: 64-bit Windows 10 & Windows 11
  • Linux: 64-bit distribution with glibc 2.17 or later
  • Apple macOS 12.6+ (Monterey) or 13.3+ (Ventura), or 14.0+ (Sonoma). Note: macOS 14.3 required for non-Apple Silicon hardware running Sonoma

3D Applications Supported

  • Autodesk Maya (Windows, Linux, macOS): 64-bit edition. 2018 or later
  • Autodesk 3ds Max (Windows): 64-bit edition. 2018 or later
  • Maxon Cinema 4D (Windows and macOS): 64-bit edition. R21 or later
  • Maxon Cinema 4D (Linux CommandLine): 64-bit edition. R21 or later
  • SideFX Houdini (Windows, Linux): 64-bit edition. 17.5 or later
  • SideFX Houdini (macOS): 64-bit edition. 18.0 or later
  • Foundry Katana (Windows, Linux): 64-bit edition. 4.0v1 or later
  • Blender (Windows, Linux): 64-bit edition. 2.83LTS or later

Minimum Requirements (Windows)

  • 16 GB of RAM
  • 64-bit processor with AVX2 support
  • NVIDIA GPU with CUDA compute capability 5.0 or higher and 8 GB VRAM, or
  • AMD “Navi” or “Vega” GPU or later with 8 GB VRAM or more (see GPU list below)
  • RedshiftRT requires an Nvidia GPU with RTX capability on Windows 10 & 11

Minimum Requirements (macOS/Intel)

  • 16 GB of RAM
  • 64-bit processor with SSE4.2 support
  • AMD “Navi” or “Vega” GPU or later with 8 GB VRAM or more (see GPU list below)

Minimum Requirements (macOS/Apple Silicon)

  • 16 GB of unified memory
  • Apple “M” Series (M1, M2 & M3)

Minimum Requirements (Linux)

  • 16 GB of RAM
  • 64-bit processor with AVX2 support
  • NVIDIA GPU with CUDA compute capability 5.0 or higher and 8 GB VRAM

Recommended Requirements

  • Windows/Linux: Core i7 or Xeon equivalent or better, 3.0GHz+ with 32 GB of RAM or more
  • Windows/Linux: Multiple NVIDIA GPUs with CUDA compute capability 7.0 or higher and 12 GB of VRAM or more and RTX technology, or
  • Windows/Linux: Multiple AMD GPUs (“Navi” series) with 12 GB of VRAM or more
  • macOS: Apple “M” series with 16 GB unified memory (or more) running the latest macOS 13 Ventura point release

Supported NVIDIA GPUs for Windows and Linux: Please visit NVIDIA CUDA GPUs – Compute Capability to determine your GPU’s compute capability (minimum compute capability required is 5.0., 7.0 is preferred).

Supported AMD GPUs for Windows:

  • Radeon PRO W7900, W7800, W6800, W6600, VII and W5700
  • Radeon RX 7950 XTX, RX7950 XT, RX7900, RX6950, RX6700 XT, RX6600 and RX5700 XT

In addition the following GPUs should be supported (but are not actively tested):

  • Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, Radeon RX Vega 56, Radeon RX Vega 64 (gfx900)
  • Radeon RX 5500 (gfx1012)
  • Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6900 (gfx1030)
  • Radeon RX 6700 (gfx1031)
  • Radeon RX 7800 (gfx1101)
  • Radeon RX 7600, Radeon 7700 (gfx1102)

Supported AMD GPUs for macOS/Intel:

MacBook Pro

  • Radeon Pro Vega 16/20
  • Radeon Pro 5500M/5600M

iMac

  • Radeon Pro Vega 48
  • Radeon Pro 5500 XT/5700/5700 XT

iMac Pro

  • Radeon Pro Vega 56/64

MacPro

  • Radeon Pro Vega II / Vega II Duo
  • Radeon Pro W5500X/W5700X
  • Radeon RX 6800/6800 XT/6900 XT
  • Radeon W6800X MPX

Thunderbolt eGPUs

  • Radeon RX Vega 56/64
  • Radeon Pro WX 9100
  • Radeon VII
  • Radeon RX 5500/5500 XT/5600 XT/5700/5700 XT
  • Radeon RX 6800/6800 XT/6900 XT
  • Radeon W6800X MPX
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