Today we're very pleased to officially announce the release of Redshift v0.1 Alpha.
Redshift is, to our knowledge, the world's first fully GPU accelerated biased production-quality renderer.
Redshift supports multiple biased global illumination techniques: Brute-Force GI, Irradiance Cache (aka Final Gather), Irradiance Point Cloud (aka Light Cache) and Photon Mapping (GI and Caustics) - all fully GPU accelerated and performing many times faster than similar CPU-based solutions. As a biased renderer, Redshift provides you with the flexibility to tune your settings where it counts to achieve noise-free results faster when compared to unbiased renderers. People familiar with Mental Ray or VRay will feel right at home with Redshift.
A problem that plagues many GPU renderers on the market is that they are limited by the available VRAM on the graphics card (and most systems have significantly less VRAM than main memory). Redshift addresses this by using an out-of-core architecture for geometry and textures allowing you to render scenes with tens of millions of polygons and gigabytes of textures with off-the-shelf, inexpensive hardware.
Redshift currently integrates directly with Softimage 2011 through 2013 and Maya 2011 through 2013 on Windows XP or higher. 3ds Max support is in development. To run Redshift, you'll need an NVidia graphics card supporting compute 1.2 or higher with 1GB VRAM or more.
You can check out our website http://www.redshift3d.com for more information.
We're starting small and looking for interested alpha testers. If you'd like to take Redshift for a spin, visit http://www.redshift3d.com/get-redshift for information on submitting a request for alpha access.
Our goals for alpha are to shake out bugs prior to releasing to a broader audience and to gather feedback from users to help focus our development efforts.
Feature Summary
- GPU accelerated raytracing, global illumination and shading
Point-based sub-surface scattering
Camera and object motion blur (deformation blur coming soon)
Instances and proxies
Flexible node-based shader system
Physically correct shaders, IES lights, physical sun & sky and physical camera
High quality elliptical texture filtering
Sample Renders