As good as the Cinema 4D’s native CPU rendering engines are, nothing beats the immediate feedback you get with a GPU rendering engine. Gone are the days you had to wait for renders and make countless render tests to get everything looking the way you wanted.
Initially I had my eye on Oytoys Octane render engine but due to their licencing policy and the fact that you have to remain connected to the internet all the time(as I learned losing your internet connection during rendering will cancel the render mid-work) changed my mind. They used to have a one time purchase licence but currently you're left with only the subscription option that I personally despise. I could probably do a whole blog post about why I don’t like software as a subscription model. Also I heard that Octane can be very unstable at times. Stability is something people usually overlook but for me it is critical when you need to get work done without crashing or wearing out Ctrl and s buttons on your keyboard.
THE SPEED
REDSHIFT is currently considered the fastest render engine on the market. And it is FAST. Prior to REDSHIFT I actually used AMD’s ProRender that was introduced as a new native GPU render engine in Cinema 4D version R19 and in R20 it got most of the features you need to make product visualizations. That engine really opened my eyes to GPU rendering. Seeing the immediate feedback is something that is very hard to go back on. Coming back to the speed of REDSHIFT. As a comparison I can achieve more realistic renders in 4K up to 6 to 10 times faster with REDSHIFT than with ProRender. That is a very BIG difference. And this matters most when rendering out 3D animations where you have thousands of frames to render.
THE CONTROL
As daunting as the REDSHIFT material system seems, it is not that hard when you get things going with the help of a few tutorials. The amount of power the nodal system gives is amazing. I always had the problem with cinema 4D native materials when you wanted to drive several channels with one noise for example. You can copy and paste the noise to the different channels but the problem starts when you need to modify the noise. So when you modify the noise in one channel all other channels now are different to the one you changed. So you end up coping the modified noise again to all the channels where you used it. And sometimes you forget to update some channels and wonder why the output is off. With the nodal material system this is none problem. You just drag the noise output to as many channels as you need and all the changes will be conveyed to all the connected channels. You can even put some nodes in the middle if you need to tweak the noise output a little without affecting the original settings. I love the amount of power this gives me to endlessly tweak and modify the material to your needs. It is also possible to combine Redshift material nodes with Cinema 4D-s xpresso nodes. I have not tried this yet but this adds to the already endless possibilities of this system to create amazing work.
THE SCALE
The magic absolute magic feature of Redshift - PROXIES. This feature enables the creation of huge digital worlds/models without worrying about how geometry heavy your scene is. I do not know about other programs but the main issue with working in Cinema 4D is, the more geometry and objects your scene contains the more sluggish your viewport gets. There is an option to chop up your project to different parts and bring it in with Xrefs so that the main file you are working in won't bloat as much. Also layer the parts up so that you can hide the ones you are currently not working on. But this will only get you so far. Eventually you will end up with a viewport that is very choppy to navigate in. Let alone to view some animations or dynamics in action. This of course will depend on the size/scope of your project. There is always the solution to optimize your geometry and bake all the detail work in with textures but this will take an enormous amount of time to do. As a lazy concept designer I would like to render/animate my models right after the concept is done - that is with crazy amounts of polygons and details/objects attached as separate geometry(And sometimes you have to work with cad models that have crazy amount of object with crazy amount of tessellation and fixing that is no easy task) And this usually ends up in a very laggy viewport performance. But with Redshift proxy this problem is a thing of the past. Now what you can do is when you finish up a model and add all the materials you can then export the model as a redshift proxy object. Open a new file and bring in that proxy object. This will now show a bounding box of that model and as far as Cinema’s viewport is concerned you basically have no geometry in your scene. The viewport moves like there is nothing there but when you run the render view then all the geometry is loaded straight to the renderer so everything you made in the file is there and rendered beautifully. Given that you have enough VRAM and internal RAM(out of core rendering feature)As a long time Cinema user the first time I witnessed this was like pure magic.I think the people at REDSHIFT could improve their marketing text a little more regarding this feature because I feel that the current description does not fully convey the possibilities that this enables. With this feature you can create a whole 3d world with no loss on viewport performance. No fancy post processing greenscreen magic needed afterwards. You just import the proxy file of your environment for example and the main subject of the scene is the only thing that will actually exist in the file as the actual geometry. So you get the full speed playback and viewport navigation. This is mind blowing stuff.
Example from my last project. The spaceship model is about 500mb large and it dragged the viewport quite heavily when everything was turned on. But as a proxy file the viewport speed reacted as if there was nothing there. But the rendering window showed everything - AMAZING STUFF...
Afterthoughts
There is one little drawback with this engine. You need to tweak a lot more settings in order to get things going. You need to jump around a couple of places to get volumes or displacement going and you need to know where to put your samples. In this regard I'm inclined to the unbiased render engines simplicity. For example I really liked the lack of settings you could tweak in Prorender. In rendering settings you basically had to set the amount of samples you wanted and hit render. It’s very fast to get things going. That was one of the reasons I initially considered Octane that also has a relatively hassle free setup process. But this is a small gripe next to the huge benefits Redshift has. It’s also much easier to cheat in Redshift because it’s a biased engine. I usually go with as realistic route as I can with my renders but it’s very handy to have an ability to cheat when the need arises to get the look you want.
For me this plugin truly widens the borders in terms of 3D rendering and animations of what you achieve with one computer.