Redshift vs Octane in 2024?

[Jeff H1]

 Blender feels like the wild wild west with cheap or free addons which helps blender tremendously, but you have to spend a bit of time getting them to work with each other and blender.  Not to mention the bugs introduced with the addons or blender itself.   You also spend time trying to figure out why your hotkeys changed only to realize it was an addon that changed settings without  your knowledge.    Oh yeah, and the more addons you get the more you have to maintain as many are updated quite often.    On the flip side, there are some solid addons for a good price or free which really helps out.  Some C4D plugin developers could learn a about setting reasonable pricing for plugins or collections.   Some want almost as much for their collection than the price of the C4D sub itself.    I know I'll probably get blasted by saying it on this forum, but lurking on Twitch, Youtube and X I see the same sentiment  regarding these unnamed plugin devs.    C4D isn't getting any cheaper! 

 

I still can't see using Blender from start to finish on most projects.   Some of Blender is just too damn irritating.   I look forward to seeing what Maxon does with R2025 too.   I'd love to see Maxon actively look at what other apps and plugins are doing and why people are using them.   What makes them so powerful?  Then look at adopting some of those features or concepts to C4D.     For instance, Light Control addon for Blender does a great job solving how to go into an editing mode for a specific light and using hotkeys to adjust various parameters like brightness, orbit, distance, temperature , angle and more.   After you are done, left mouse click to get out of editing that light.    Such a simple concept.   https://blendermarket.com/products/light-control

Edited August 27 by Jeff H1 (see edit history)

[Mash]

I do wonder how many of these crashes people complain about are just the current realities of gpu based render engines all being less stable than their cpu counterparts due to endlessly changing gpu drivers. How much is c4d itself being unstable vs redshift being the new standard render engine. 99% of my crashes are octane. Even if redshift is a fraction of that, it could still be the main reason,

[BoganTW]

That's probably a fair guess. The luminaries in the thread who were all grumbling somewhat are all heavy Redshift users too.

[Smolak]

1 hour ago, BoganTW said:

That's probably a fair guess. The luminaries in the thread who were all grumbling somewhat are all heavy Redshift users too.

I'm not. Octane user.

[BoganTW]

I was talking about Motionpunk's thread on Twitter, but fair enough.  Has C4D / Octane been crashing for you much?

[Smolak]

Mainly GPU renderers are like to crash often. There is no situation where they exactly crash. I noticed that Octane and Redshift can crash mostly during material node manipulation. Sometimes Redshift can crash during simple camera rotation in large scene if he didn't finish refreshing OGL update materials. This is why I disable OGL materials preview in large scenes. Also it is much more responsive after that.

Edited August 29 by Smolak (see edit history)

[Mash]

I've used c4d as my main tool for 25 years now and have been using octane as my primary engine for the last 6 years. I can tell you that I've had more crashes because of octane in my first year of use than I'd had from c4d (including betas, alphas and other plugins) for the first 20 years. But we've stuck with it because the productivity gain, render speed gain and image quality gain over standard render was exceptional.

 

There are certain actions and areas you learn to save before doing because you know they have a high chance of a crash (delete unused materials whilst the asset manager is open, pressing undo before the last undo has finished when live view is enabled), But Smolak is right, it can and absolutely will shit in your bowl of cornflakes whenever it feels like it. You can change the diffuse colour a thousand times, but the next colour change will crash it. You can kill it applying materials, navigating, animating. Heck Ive had octane crash whilst my computer sat idle and I went for a piss.

 

The wrong drivers will crash octane

The wrong windows update

The wrong pcie slot

the wrong pcie riser cable

The wrong gpu clock speed (we had a 1080 that when the OC edition cards added that extra 50mhz, they would all die)

 

Now for redshift, I honestly haven't put enough hours into it, but even if its way more stable than octane, that still leaves it as potentially causing loads of crashes.

[Smolak]

My friend who works with 3dMax from years told me that this is the most crashy software in the world. He compared it to Maya, Blender and C4D also. Probably he not use C4D often. But 3DS is industry standard probably because of plugins to be clear.