Redshift vs Octane in 2024?

[Mash]

14 hours ago, Jeff H1 said:

excited to see how Octane compares from a usability standpoint

 

Then proceeds to not compare them in the review in any way, shape or form.

[MJV]

For more about Octane I just noticed recently that the Cinema 4D Octane support articles on the OTOY site are really comprehensive and well written. This article on displacement for example in Octane for Cinema 4D: https://help.otoy.com/hc/en-us/articles/5384832960539-Displacement-in-Octane-for-Cinema-4D-Part-2-Model-and-Texture-Considerations

[3D-Pangel]

On 12/6/2023 at 3:06 PM, Jeff H1 said:

 

I cringe at CB articles some times.   One of the Cons:  is not easy to install for novices when later in the article they state "installing was typical for a C4D plugin".   They also mention Redshift GPU comes with C4D.  It does not. "It is worth noting that Cinema 4D does come with its own GPU renderer in the excellent Redshift, so I was excited to see how Octane compares from a usability standpoint."   There are some more that are head scratchers.

Outside of that, it's a shame that not enough care is given for the other Octane plugins.  Maya has always been a mess.   Octane for Blender is seemingly in perpetual beta.

 

 

It is not correct that RS in the latest release of C4D is NOT GPU enabled.

 

 It was at one time when you could purchase C4D without RS but no longer.  You only have to look at the pricing to convince yourself that RS is now GPU enabled in C4D.   Here is why.  Maxon raised the prices of an annual C4D subscription from roughly $720 USD to $983 per year with the latest 2024 release (maybe it was the 2023 release, not sure).  That is exactly $263 more which is about equal to the annual subscription price for the full stand-alone version of RS at $264/year.  Oddly enough that increase is also equal to the annual subscription cost for Octane which is $264.4 USD (at this time as Octane is only priced in Euro's).  

 

So, if Maxon is increasing the prices for C4D + Redshift (the only option they offer for C4D now), then you are getting the full RS which means with the GPU renderer.

 

These facts also fly in the face of the arguments of people switching to Octane if they are forced to pay additional for RS as part of the C4D bundle.   Cost is removed from that argument if you are a render engine agnostic (e.g. no render religion).    This may be why RS was bundled with C4D to begin with because if you are only looking for a GPU enabled renderer, then C4D now has one and therefore removes the financial need to look elsewhere.   Getting Octane for C4D is now an additional cost on top of the C4D + RS subscription in achieving that goal.

 

You can still have that choice between Octane or RS at cost parity, but only if you want to stay with C4D R25 (the last perpetual license) or earlier.  And honestly when you look at all the advancements made with C4D since then (pyro, new improved physics' system, some great modeling tools, capsules, etc.), then you have to rethink your entire DCC kit of tools because staying with C4D R25 is NOT the best choice for keeping current (already 2 years behind).

 

Therefore, the choice between Octane and RS is NOT a financial one.  It is whether or not each renderer is meeting your personal and artistic needs.   The personal needs come from ease of use, stability and speed.  Which is more valuable to you?   Honestly, this is something you can't argue simply because it is personal.  I don't think RS is that difficult to optimize and I like the control it gives me.  If I am rendering with motion blur, then do I really need to worry as much about noise? Probably not so let's cut back on the ray count to decrease render time.  

 

I also love the fact that I can import an old C4D scene, and the materials automatically convert to RS.   This keeps all my old assets relevant.  Now is the conversion 100% perfect?  Well, it is getting there, but at least the integration with C4D gives me a very good starting point and removes a ton of work for large scenes.   Does Octane convert old C4D AR scenes to Octane materials?  Not sure but that would be good to know.

 

So, if you leave ease of use and speed off the table, then the argument comes down to stability and artistic fulfillment.  Simply, which renderer produces the better image with the least amount of effort.  Note the emphasis on effort.  Why? Well in the hands of a true master, you can get great results out of any render engine.  

 

Now that is a discussion worth having!

 

Dave

 

 

[Mash]

@3D-Pangel, youve made the same mistake I, and many others have made. The current maxon store website is poorly designed. The current 2024 version of c4d includes redshift cpu, it does not include redshift gpu. If you click the "c4d + redshift" button on the store page, youre then given 2 options, without gpu for one price and with gpu for a higher price.

 

Regarding material conversion, octanes material conversion is about as useful as redshifts. You'll get basic colours and textures applied if you have simple materials, but the moment you talk about layers, shaders, sss or anything else then they fall apart rapidly. Ive not had a single material convert into any engine that didnt need to be replaced or updated. But at least you can tell what many materials were supposed to be.

[3D-Pangel]

7 hours ago, Mash said:

@3D-Pangel, youve made the same mistake I, and many others have made. The current maxon store website is poorly designed. The current 2024 version of c4d includes redshift cpu, it does not include redshift gpu. If you click the "c4d + redshift" button on the store page, youre then given 2 options, without gpu for one price and with gpu for a higher price.

 

Regarding material conversion, octanes material conversion is about as useful as redshifts. You'll get basic colours and textures applied if you have simple materials, but the moment you talk about layers, shaders, sss or anything else then they fall apart rapidly. Ive not had a single material convert into any engine that didnt need to be replaced or updated. But at least you can tell what many materials were supposed to be.

 

Actually, you are ONLY offered the C4D + Redshift option from the main BUY window - which is how I was basing my arguments.  I did not realize that after clicking that option you can then decide to keep C4D + RS or either upgrade to Maxon One or downgrade to just C4D (no Redshift GPU).   Interesting that just the C4D option was still available.   

 

Now, with that option to just get RS CPU with C4D, you have to ask how often do I need GPU rendering?  If you feel you can get by with CPU rendering for most of your work, then go with just C4D.  You can still build and test your RS renders in the CPU version and should you need GPU rendering then just purchase a monthly license of RS at one-sixth the cost of the annual license.  Honestly, that would be cheaper way to go if you feel you only need GPU capabilities for less than 6 months out of the year.

 

Dave

 

 

[Jops]

It is just a matter of time, till C4D without GPU redshift will be gone from the maxon website. it is just more "elegant" way to increase prices.

[adamfilip]

funny have people have opposite experiences. but I switched from octane to redshift as octane kept crashing on me. and made me miss deadlines.. never looked back TBH

[Smolak]

This my copy-paste mail to friend from some days ago :

 

"..... I'm very surprised how this engine was grown during this period especially compared to Octane development from last two years which is slow. They didn't implemented most of their advertised roadmap features.
 

1. As for quality I did many test using different scenes and I must say that I don't see differences. Even Redshift looks better for my taste. It looks more like Vray, Corona in the terms of light transporting to darker areas. I reported this 2 years ago on Octane forum with rendering examples of the same scene rendered in Octane and Corona. Octane needs much higher material brightness to achieve the same results but it create overexposure on areas directly lighting by Sun which needs tonemapping to avoid this. But pure bright material in Octane will always be much darker in indirect light areas than in Vray, Corona and Redshift too.

Without denoiser Octane is much noiser than Redshift using rendering clamped to the same time for example 25seconds rendering

 

Octane :

 

Redshift :

 

As you see Redshift is brighter in shadowed part and color transportation is more pronounced but you can lower this by using Redshift diffuse clamping by little :

 

Such thing and many others are not possible in Octane because it is biased renderer. In unbiased like Redshift you have full control about many render engine aspect like light transportation, which object can be visible in reflection in others or even every material can have its own environment map.

 

2. It is great integrated with Cinema. Materials are correctly represented in OGL preview, fully suport for C4D modern node editor with all features.

 

3. It has three rendering modes

   fast progressive just like Octane but for preview because it always be little noise
   final bucket rendering - clear, insane fast especially if scene grows with many vegetation objects
   RT on beta stage but this is truly real time, noise free engine just like game. It is only for realtime previews but looks very close to final.

 

4. It has special sprite node that greatly improve speed of rendering planes with opacity masks like leaves, even better shading :

 

RS ( zoomed ) :

 

Octane ( zoomed ) :

 

5. Node system. Octane has maybe 3-4x more nodes but to be clear - most of them you never use because there is no need or they produce strange results. Redshift nodes are very well thought out, versatile. Even simple gradient node is more powerful. Mixing materials works like old Octane mix material where you can mix existing materials using material reference node and you can mix many of them.

 

6. Redshift doesn't have texture displacement which is Octane strongest feature. But it have very good optimized geometry displacement which works like Unreal nanite virtualized geometry system where intensity of geometry subdivision level depends on distance from camera and it can be cut-off on areas which camera don't see. You can freely mix displacements so for displaced asphalt you can add displaced crack decal without problem. Thanks to stacked materials, this decal can be easily put in object just after main material. In Octane truly geometry displacement is terrible slow because it subdivide all large surface with insane amount of polygons.

 

I forgot about one important feature like Redshift Proxy. As you know proxies are insane fast to render especially in animation because they doesn't need preprocessing time and they are very light to interface. 100 hi res trees as proxies are still much better than 100 multi-instances even if their visibility is set to off.

In Octane if you want to change proxy material like color, brightness, or texture you must open Octane Standalone and edit them here by "eye" because you use default Octane scene, lighting. In Redshift you can apply different materials to proxy and edit them inside main scene without the need to use external software and scene ! 

 

 

Edited August 20 by Smolak (see edit history)

[adamfilip]

[BoganTW]

I was going to post a big thread about MotionPunk's long Twitter thread on C4D crashiness a few days ago, but I won't. I'm hoping next month's C4D 2025 is an improvement. The new core has had a year to settle in and posts on Reddit and Twitter about how much buggier the app currently is are discouraging. I'm hoping they can smooth this out a bit before I resubscribe. Despite the expense I think C4D and Redshift are a good combo, but having C4D build a rep as one of the more crash-happy DCC's as of late is not where I thought that core rewrite was headed.

Edited August 24 by BoganTW (see edit history)

[Jeff H1]

Maxon grins and bears this criticism because at the end of the day, they KNOW people like Motion Punk and others will not completely ditch C4D and their legacy scenes for something new.   Subscriptions ensured reliance on their software in order to work on legacy scene files.  

 

 

Maxon execs when they see another critical tweet or comment from someone...

 

[BoganTW]

Might be worth a longer discussion but I'll wait a few weeks till when next months release hits.

 

Maxon are probably now trying to balance investment on new features with investment into doubling back and fixing bugs or polishing up what they've already added. I used to see and hear that they were doing a decent job of this, but long threads on Reddit and twitter with responses from some major C4D users like EJ or Chad Ashley) all basically argue the balance is a bit off at the moment and C4D is in a much more crashy state than usual.

 

The question is whether the subscription cadence is diverting the devs from keeping the overall application tidy. No time to go back and fix that longstanding bug or make the app less crashy, we need a few new features in 8 weeks time.

 

I'm not thrilled but also not bothered by the price difference between C4D and the other apps. It is what it is and anyone can decide if they want to pay it to sit in the room with a functional C4D license for a year or not. I want to give the new particles system a try and check out the training that Noseman and Chris Schmidt have done for it, so it will be worth a play for me. But again I'm not liking the reports from longtime C4D users that app stability has become a lot worse as of late. That's a pet hate of mine and has me holding off for a little bit, while not jumping ship altogether.

 

I've looked at Houdini and find it interesting and have looked at Blender and find it full of minor annoyances that bug me in comparison to how C4D does stuff. But Maxon need to sort out whatever is making C4D crash more than usual. Chad Ashley agreed that it's become worse, Maxon need to make it better. And then second on the list after that is the long long list of features that C4D has needed for years and which the core rewrite was meant to open the door to. I'm happy to wait and see what this coming release and year brings but like probably many others I'm not going to wait forever.