Advise on RedShift for XSI

[I3D]

Hey Everyone

I've been using Octane with C4D for a while now and I miss animating in XSI, I feel like I was living in a high castle and got evicted and living in the streets when animating anywhere else except for XSI. A lot of I do in C4D I can do in XSI if I can render through the GPU. Octane is not an option and I can see RedShift is still being used/developed?

For those who have experience with RedShift in XSI. What are your impressions? Is it actively developed? is there any limitations/drawbacks compared to say RedShift for C4D or other platforms?

Thank you

[MKXSI]

Hi I3D
I've never used RedShift on XSI but if realtime viewport is not a must, u can use Cycles to render with GPU.

[I3D]

Thanks MKXSI

I've tried Cycles for XSI, getting a lot of noise from it and cracking up the sampling to insane numbers. I do have to admit that I didn't realise that it supported GPU rendering. I've just did and took my rendering down to half with a combination of CPU and GPU (GPU alone was 25% less than CPU). The denoising tab is empty though and OptiX doesn't seem to work is that correct?

[xsisoft]

(try it)
animate in softimage
transfer the scene through -alembic to cinema4d
and make shading in cinema4d

(write how it...)

redshift 3 support ...
AOV is not supported. only simple innovations
Redshift v3 support softimage 2015
http://www.si-community.com/community/v ... t+3#p62924

[wireframex]

Sycles is a beast if you own good CPU ans multi GPU cards together

Denoising is very good, no need to use more than 400 samples in general maybe for inside architectural rendering

FYI I use 3 x RTX 2080 + ryzen 3990x (64 Cores)

[Shekn]

I3D
Denoising tab empty only when you open old scene with new version of the Sycles. OptiX denoiser should works with OptiX render device. But this is experimental and the render may crashes or it may render an image with artifacts. Built-in OpenImage denoiser works perfect. Fast and more accurate than old denoiser. All Nvidia GPUs should works.

[I3D]

@xsisoft, @Shaken and @wireframex thank you for the feedback. It's clear that I still need a lot to learn about Sycles! I wasn't aware of there is an Openimage denoiser that ships with Sycles, I'll look for it and test it.

My only concern is cloud rendering. I'm not planning to invest in HW, it is a lot more economical (for me at this stage) to do cloud rendering. With Sycles, is there a way to output Sycles to a native format than can be rendered on any Cycles renderfarm?

[jonmoore]

The Alembic pipeline between Softimage and C4D is actually pretty solid. As long as you realise that you only to make simple materials in Softimage (Lamberts will do), all your selection sets (clusters) survive the journey and more importantly there are no normal-shading errors. I prefer Redshift in Houdini but now that Redshift works with the new Material Nodes system in C4D (rather than the creaky old Xpresso system), I'm increasingly warming to C4D as a look-dev environment. The combination of decent LUT support, the RS RenderView and Magic Bullet Looks in the RS RenderView (as well as in the C4D GL viewport) makes for a compelling set of features.

C4D now uses Alembic as it's core cache format, so it's staying the pace as the format changes.

I like the rendering options I have in Softimage but Redshift is strictly in maintenance mode these days. Maya, C4D or Houdini are all serious considerations if Redshift is your main renderer, (I'd even add 3ds Max to that mix for the ace procedural Tyflow toolset that is free right now and will continue to be for quite some time). Houdini, Max and Maya have the added benefit of being available as Indie rentals. C4D may not have an Indie variant (yet!), but the MaxonOne option offers great value considering it's a bundle of C4D, Redshift and the whole Red Giant suite. However, Maxon being Maxon, have opted to only offer the $99 per month offer to those purchasing the subscription annually. If you want to pay monthly, the price jumps to $149 per month.

I love Softimage and as long as I have a workstation with an operating system to run it I'll continue to use it for many workflows. ICE still does things that aren't possible in other DCC nodal environments.

I'm on the C4D beta and hope to introduce at least some elements of ICE to Neutron their 'tech preview' nodal environment, but we'll have to wait and see. Bifrost in Maya is powerful, but it has nowhere near the same 'artist friendly' architecture as ICE. Plus the integration sucks. Where with ICE you can query for virtually any attribute on virtually any object, doing the same in Bifrost involves too many obstacles.

ICE is dead, Long live ICE!

[I3D]

I agree @jonmoore. For me I've left the scene 10 years ago and moved into serious software engineering and server management, which was a blessing to relieve the stress of working in this industry. I've just came back to 3D again during this Covid phase with the purpose of producing animated cartoon my 2 and half year old. Problem is my pipeline was XSI-Messiah Studio and LW for some parts. What is in common between these three?! They all went kaput Sometimes I feel I'm like a ship looking for a port to dock!!

I've used C4D during the Amiga days and shortly after it was ported to windows, never got into it. But decided to pick it now over Blender just because it is easier to get around and understand, at least the coordinates are still in the right direction in C4D

The reason why I'm still clinging to XSI is because I'm getting tired of spending time learning the workings of C4D, a lot has changed in 10 years. Alembic being one (Thank you Exocortex Crate, and thank you for the tips for a better import), the real time render engines and PBR. Although C4D is simple enough, there is still some learning to know how each tool works. And I just want to create and not sit in-front of training videos. I'm currently rendering using 3delight (I had experience with it and love it along side it's simple cloud rendering) and only recently decided to try Octane and I immediately felt tooo old Where was this renderer back in my time!!!

MAxon prices are expensive if you are like me and not working for a paid gig, what is worse is that Maxon charges me in Euros and I'm in Australia. Sot that is double the amount excluding the outrageous bank fees. But it's a monthly thing for now until proven otherwise. I did a decent amount of time doing ad serving and building ad servers, so check in with me in a couple of months time if YouTube monetisation actually pays the bills from kids animation shows

Cheers

[mattmos]

In your position I really would take another look at blender. Its making big strides, there's a ton of help out there, and Redshift is arriving shortly. Though it seems like denoising + rtx gpu may get you fast enough using cycles/eevee.
There are render farms out there, even ones which you can use for free as long as you contribute machine time every so often. (sheepit)

[Maximus]

i wouldnt recommend Redshift at all.

[mattmos]

i wouldnt recommend Redshift at all.

I remember some of your redshift work from a while back, really nice stuff. Why the change of heart?

[Maximus]

i wouldnt recommend Redshift at all.

I remember some of your redshift work from a while back, really nice stuff. Why the change of heart?

Because they acted extremely bad and unfair against me,banning me from the forum and being able to redownload the software i bought. unprofessional. They accused me of having a cracked version when i have a legit bought license. Amateurs

[mattmos]

sorry, that's awful treatment. Did you not have proof of purchase? Want me to contact them about it? Must be a major error on their system/record-keeping.

[Maximus]

sorry, that's awful treatment. Did you not have proof of purchase? Want me to contact them about it? Must be a major error on their system/record-keeping.

no i dont wanna have anything to do with that shitty company anymore, of course i have proof but they banned be because my son fiddled with some rlm stuff since he likes to download trash from internet and i found on my system the RLM that back then was used to crack redshift on the net. (why would i even crack redshift if i have it original, they didnt even bother to think).

They knew i had a valid license of course, but they decided to ban me just because they have found that file on my computer (so they said, which is even more alarming from a company that spies on you). So they risen up as Internet Sheriff and decided that since i had a non original RLM (that had NOTHING to do with Redshift) i needed to be banned.

Its hilarious Also they dont even know how their own software works. They said that the version i was using was 100% cracked because the license i had wouldnt work on that. completely false and i have proof that the serial they sent me when i bought Redshift was working perfectly and i was eligible to use that version.

bunch of amateurs.

p.s. i had to sum it up quickly, but if u want i can even copy paste the emails lol. besides the fact that they get very aggressive with insults too.

[mattmos]

Really sucks Quite glad I don't have to share my workstation with my sons, don't know what would end up on there, but probably more paw patrol than rlm

So what are you moving onto? Octane, Sycles, something completely different?