What is Redshift?

hello and welcome my name is jonas pils i'm master trainer at maxon and today i want to introduce you to redshift so this presentation will be split into three parts first i want to introduce you to the concept of redshift then we're gonna have a live demo inside of cinema 4d using redshift and after that i want to show you a few more of the key advantages of redshift in the second part of the keynote so let's get started we're going to start with the question what is redshift and on the redshift website it says that redshift is the world's first fully gpu accelerated biased renderer so what does that mean well fully gpu accelerated means that redshift is a gpu renderer it's running on the gpu only and biased means that redshift does not necessarily do stuff as it would happen in nature but it would fake some things in order to optimize them for rendering so again what does that mean first of all being a biased renderer means that redshift is fast and i mean it's really fast and the second thing is that it's really flexible whenever you work with a sample based renderer as redshift it is good to have full control over all of the samples that are going to be shot into the scene but on the other hand if you want to create a quick render or you don't want to mess with all of these settings you don't have to use them you can switch to automatic mode and redshift will do everything for you but coming back to speed let's talk about how fast stretch of this and of course we can talk about this a lot but let me show you some actual numbers but a little bit of background information here my gpu on my office machine is an nvidia geforce gtx 2070 super and using this gpu i rendered this sequence here let me play it so that's a little shot that can be part of an architectural visualization project and i rendered this on that gpu now here are some numbers i rendered 91 frames in full hd and the total render time was 2 hours and 38 minutes that's an average render time per frame of 1 minute and 45 seconds now imagine that we had a second gpu in that machine then we could bring down the render time to something like 50 seconds per frame in full hd and that is crazy fast now the next thing i want to talk about is the material light and camera system inside of redshift and of course redshift is coming with its own material light and camera system and the reason for that is simply that every renderer wants to optimize their cameras lights and materials for the rendering process and for the rendering algorithms same happens here with redshift and one cool thing is that redshift's materials are node based so you can really flexibly create your materials and have for example one texture that is linked into the color the bump maybe some reflection roughness and so on and as soon as you replace that texture in the texture node it will be replaced in the whole material so ratchet's note based materials are another thing that allows for maximum flexibility all right now it's time to show something but before we jump into cinema 4d let me tell you what kind of machine i have here because i'm not in the office obviously so currently i'm working on a macbook pro and i've got an e-gpu connected to it which is an amd radeon pro w 5700 all right now let's jump into cinema 4d to see redshift in action here we are in cinema 4d and whenever you have redshift installed you will find it up here in the main menu and you can create a bunch of objects from here or have a look at the preferences and here you can see the redshift version as well as the graphics card or cards you are using here's the one i mentioned earlier all right so one of the most important things in redshift is that we need a view that allows us to interactively preview our scene so there is the redshift renderview and the redshift viewport ipr and i will use both of them for now i have this in here i will have another scene in a few minutes for this scene let's use the redshift renderview and this comes as a separate window this is a rendering i created earlier and once i hit play here you can see that redshift is transferring the geometry over to the gpu and starts rendering we can now move the viewport here and you can see that the ipr is reacting instantly and therefore we instantly see what we are doing we can set up materials like that we can create the lighting like that and it's just amazing now the redshift render view also allows you for example to create snapshots and compare them simply by using these buttons here it allows you a little bit more than the viewport ipr also you can have a region tool here just to render a region all right let's make it a little bit smaller again and let's have a look at the materials we have a copper material and one that includes some subsurface scattering and i want to recreate those materials so let me pause the rendering here and let's just get rid of these two materials and let's also get rid of the materials down here in the material manager and let's recreate them okay first let's have a look at the renderer we are currently using because this redshift render view will always use redshift as the renderer but we can also have a look here at the render settings and now you can see that the renderer is set to redshift this is important for now because there are two ways of creating redshift materials one is to go to create down here and redshift materials and here you can create those materials using the shader graph which is based on espresso or you can go to create materials node material and this will automatically create a node material in the node space for redshift you can see that up here up here we can choose the node space we can use standard physical or redshift or we can set it to current which will always use the current renderer this is why i set it to redshift okay so in here we now have a redshift material if i double click here you see these nodes and these are redshift nodes all right you can see that the interface is now a little bit cluttered with stuff so what i already did is i created a layout for redshift so let's use this instead so now the preview is a little bit pixelated but this will be gone in a second so let's deactivate the previews in order to save some space and also make this one a little bit smaller and we want to recreate the copper so let's double click here that's the material manager and rename this to copper and let's also assign it already to the spline mesh geometry here and i will create a copy of the copper material call this green hit enter and just apply it to the other one and now with the copper selected so it's available here in the node graph i will hit render again and this will start the rendering once the whole scene is on the gpu again okay now we can set up our materials let's start with the copper and here in the material node if we go back to the attributes you can see that we have a few tabs here so there is a tab for the base properties this is basically where you can set up a complete material which includes a diffuse color reflections refractions and also subsurface gathering but there is an advanced subsurface gathering for skins which also includes the different layers foreskin then there is a separate coating layer an overall tab where we have things like opacity emission or bump and some other tabs for optimizations and advanced settings we keep on doing stuff here in the base properties and one thing you might have noticed is this first little parameter that is called preset and in here we can go to aluminum for example so now that material is aluminum we can go to glass so now it's a glass and we can try all of these different things the cool thing is that all of the parameters here will adjust so we can tweak them further so let's go back to copper because we want to use a copper material and we want to create a little bit more variation so let's say we want to go to reflection and here is the reflection roughness and we want to control this reflection roughness by using a texture therefore we need a texture and i will go to the content browser to get one click the magnifying glass here and search for a smudge map like so and i like this one here so let's just drag and drop it into the node editor and i will deactivate the preview we don't need it for now and hit the solo button here now we can see that the texture is so lowed and by default the material is set using uv coordinates and because this whole geometry has been created using a volume builder and a volume measure we have this spherical mapping on it we want to change that and we can either set the mapping in the texture tag here to cubic but then we would see seams here on the model so what we use instead is a node called tri-planar and i'm going to hit c to bring up the nodes commander and type in try and here it is i'm going to bring it to the node graph simply by dragging and dropping it i'm going to deactivate the preview here to save some space and just wire the texture up and set it to image x and now i set the triplaner node to solo and here you can already see that this is much better now so here we can see that the texture is not as stretched anymore we can adjust the tiling a little bit so let's go down in the texture node to the remap options and let's set the scale to three by three that's actually the tiling and here in the tri planar node the cool thing about that is that it actually works a little bit like cubic mapping but with the advantage that we have a blend amount here so we can blend between the textures and as soon as i do so you can see that we are blending here and this is much better than before because we don't see the seams anymore and now because we want to use this to control the roughness here in the material we need to remap it a little bit because whenever you control a parameter using a texture black areas of an image mean that there is no effect so zero percent roughness in this case and white areas are 100 percent roughness in this case 100 effect so what we want to do is we want to remap these values so they are for example between 20 and 40 percent and in order to do so i'm gonna hit c here again and type in gradient and you can see that the ramp node pops up although i type in gradient there is the ramp node so you can see that the tagging is also working i just drag and drop it onto the existing wire and now i'm gonna scroll down here in the ramp options and just double click one not and i'm gonna set this one to let's say twenty percent and the other one to forty percent and now i remap the values of black and white to 20 gray and 40 gray and you can also see it here it's not as contrasty anymore and we can pipe this triplaner note into the material reflection roughness so let's do that and let's unsolve the triplina node and here we go here you can see a little bit of the variation in the reflection we can also make it a little bit more contrasty again so maybe let's unfold the color here and let's bring this down a little bit so we have a little bit more contrast a little bit more glossiness in here and now you can see that this is working pretty well we could also do this with the reflection weight which is the strength simply by using this triplaner node also in reflection weight and this would be the same but it doesn't look as good so i simply double click the wire to get rid of that and here we go now it's all good again okay now let's create the subsurface scattering material so we go to materials we double click the green one and go back to attributes and in here we don't need any textures so we just set this diffuse color here to something greenish something like so and then we go down here in the properties maybe let's fold the diffuse the reflection the sheen we don't need that we need to go to the refraction and transmission options and down here to subsurface and there are two subsurface scattering modes and one is extinction and i prefer that and now let me also enable the backlight that i already set up i'm gonna deactivate the dome light and instead i'm going to activate the backlight and as you can see it's all black now here is the backlight and i want to use that in order to set up the subsurface scattering so in the extinction coefficient i'm going to bring up the value here and i'm also going to bring up the scatter scale and now you can see that something is happening here by using the scatter coefficient we can also adjust the colorization of the subsurface scattering and you can see that it's all live so i'm already pretty happy with that so i'm going to switch back on my dome light and now i also have my subsurface gathering effect in here now let's simply check for a nice framing like so and let's render this to the picture view i'm gonna stop the render view here and i'm also going to go back to my startup layout and now i'm gonna hit render so this is a rendering in the resolution 1280 by 720 it's extracting the geometry right now and i want to show you the speed of this whole thing in this rendering all right i'm gonna fast forward this a little bit so it's going even faster and here we go one minute and 29 seconds for rendering that contains rough reflections and also subsurface scattering that's pretty good all right now let's go to another scene which is my bathroom scene my bathroom vanity scene and what i want to show you here is how to set up some lighting i go to the redshift menu and i'm gonna use the redshift viewport ipr for this one so this brings up just a little window and if you hit play you can see that the actual rendering is happening in the viewport instead of a separate window and this allows you to directly interact as you render here in the viewport which is pretty cool all right so as you can see by default this doesn't look really nice it's actually pretty flat and so on and what you can also see is that everything except for the models here except for the geometry is black and this is exactly the reason for the whole thing being so flat because there is no lighting but in a physically based renderer such as redshift everything is a reflection so you need something to reflect in order to make the materials and the objects look good all right and the first thing i always do when i start lighting a scene is i go to redshift lights and i use a dome light because the dome light is a dome so you have a reflection background for everything and as you can see it's already looking much better than before there is some shadow here you can see that inside the doors it's shadowy and also there is some reflection here in the mirror of course it's pure white because the dome light doesn't come with the texture by default but we can change that so again let's go to the content browser and this time we search for hdr to bring up all of the hdr textures and i'm just gonna use this one here so i'm gonna drag and drop it into the dome map and here we go now we have something that is reflecting and i'm also going to rotate the whole thing so let's go to the rotate tool and let's rotate it and this is the advantage of the viewport ipr that i can just use the gizmos here inside of the viewport all of the handles and move them around rotate them and so on and the viewport will react okay let's say that i'm happy with this and i just want to add another area light i just want to add a light that is coming from the top here so what i do is i go to redshift lights and this time i'm going to add an area light so here we go this is the area light you can see that it's way too bright and of course it's also way too big so maybe let's zoom out a little bit and first let's move it up then let's scale it down to something like this and i also want to scale it so that it's non-uniformly scaled like so i want to rotate it by 90 degrees something like this and then just move it up and i'm gonna do this in the side view here let's just place it somewhere up here so that's cool i'm happy with that and you can see this is a really interactive process now so there is no waiting for the rendering and such things one thing i don't like about this right now is that the light and the area light that we just created is a little bit too bright so i select the area light and in the general tab i go down to the intensity multiplier and i can just play with the intensity and i like something like this that's pretty cool and maybe i also want to adjust the light color i can also do that so let's bring up the color here and let's give it a little bit of a warm tint something like this and now let's say that we finished the lighting and we want to find a nice camera angle and then we want to add some depth of field to make it look even more interesting so let's say this is the angle that we want something like this and yeah now let's add a camera so we can add depth of field we don't use this camera here we go to redshift cameras and use the standard camera there are also other cameras of course for now we need the standard camera and this will create a camera a cinema 4d camera with a redshift camera tag on it now the cool thing is that the redshift camera tag is capable of reading stuff here in the cinema 4d camera so what we're going to do is we're going to set up the camera first of all i'm going to use the focus picker here and pick the focus let's say here this is going to be our focus and then i'm going to go to physical and i'm going to bring down the f-stop to 1 so we get extreme depth of field and then i'm going to go to the redshift camera tag and there is a tab called bokeh and this is where we can set up depth of field and we have to override the global render settings and enable the depth of field and now you can already see that we have some depth of field the focal plane is in place and it's also using our f-stop of one because derived from camera is set to focus distance and coc radius all right now let's say that the depth of field is a little bit too much so let's select the camera again and let's bring up the f-stop let's say to 2 and i think this is a pretty good value i'm happy with that we can also still rotate the camera and stuff like that i'm gonna undo the camera move and now let's say we want to render this so i'm going to disable the regis viewport ipr and i'm gonna hit render up here because we want to render this to the picture viewer and here you can already see that this is quite fast i didn't speed this up yet i'm gonna speed it up in a second so that we can finish this rendering a little bit earlier all right it's finished you can see that we rendered a resolution of 1280 by 720 again which is not too big but it took only one minute and five seconds to complete the rendering in full hd like 1080p this would be around two minutes a little bit more than two minutes so this is pretty awesome because it's photorealistic it's absolutely great to show some stuff in this case for architectural visualization and it is so fast that you don't really have to wait for the rendering because it was just a minute so this is really cool now let me get back to the keynote presentation so i can show you a few others of the key features of redshift okay you already saw how you can create materials and how to set up a lighting situation now i want to talk about other key features of redshift and the very first one i want to talk about is out of court geometry and textures that's a technology which is pretty powerful because it allows you to render really big scenes using redshift as you might know with gpu rendering the restricting factor is always video memory or gpu memory so if you have a small graphics card with let's say 8 gigabytes of memory or 12 that's not as much as 64 gigabytes of ram but what redshift is capable of is streaming the geometry and textures from the ram onto the gpu and directly render it this allows you to create huge scenes with a lot of geometry and a lot of textures which is definitely necessary when you want to create for example a huge vfx rendering or something that needs more than the available video memory all right redshift also comes with a powerful aov system and aovs are arbitrary output variables and you might already know them from cinema 4d where they are called multipasses so what you can do with the aov system is for example you can split up your rendering into the diffuse component into reflection into refraction direct illumination global illumination you can create a depth channel or a motion vector and all of this supporting the 32-bit open exr workflow the next cool thing is support for instancing redshift supports cinema for these instances but redshift also comes with its own instancing system where the instances are created on the gpu and this is again for optimization reasons so if you would instantiate any object in the cinema 4d scene and then bring it over to the gpu it would need much more memory than if you just bring it over to the gpu once and create multiple instances of it on the gpu you can also render particles using redshift including changes in colorization over time and so on hair is also supported so if you have a character with hair that's no problem or if you want to render a carpet with some hair or fake grass all of this is possible redshift also comes with support for volumetrics so you can load in any vdb sequence or file and just render it using the redshift volume shader but it also has a very powerful environment object that allows you to create fog and therefore very atmospheric environments and the last thing i want to name here is command line rendering of course you can use redshift to distribute your rendering over the network so you can speed up the rendering using the full power of all of your machines cool another important question is which host systems and applications are supported by redshift and i want to start with the host systems of course redshift is available for windows but also for linux and for macos on windows and linux it is based on cuda so you have to use an nvidia graphics card if you want to use redshift on a windows or linux system and on mac os redshift will use metal so you would have to use an amd card on mac os the mac os version is currently in beta and you need big sur for that but it already works like a charm although it's beta now the host applications are cinema 4d maya 3ds max houdini katana and blender the blender version is also in beta at the moment now let's talk about the benefits of redshift in general first of all of course it is production proven many studios are already using it in their production pipeline of course because it's so feature-rich i mean i showed you the feature set before and it's just incredible such as the speed of redshift you've also seen that and also the flexibility with node-based materials and all of the settings regarding sampling that you can't use but you don't have to as i told you before and of course another benefit is that redshift is available for all the dccs that i showed you on the previous slide now here we have motion graphics and design here we have visualization in this case it's architectural visualization but it can also be industrial visualization or medical it doesn't matter redshift is really good for all sorts of visualization redshift is also being used in visual effects and this is a shot from the expanse some of you might know it and here we have animated film as well redshift is being used in all branches where you have to generate nice imagery all right that's pretty much the end of the video i hope you now have an idea of what redshift is capable of and how fast it is please go to the redshift website and download it today so you can start testing it and also follow us on social media and see you next time bye

Channel: Maxon Training Team

Views: 18,826

Rating: 4.9433961 out of 5

Keywords: Maxon, Red Giant, C4D, Cinema 4D, VFX, Post production, tutorial, Redshift

Id: LBKvt6DMNJY

Length: 29min 19sec (1759 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021