Redshift 3.5 Has Released - Highlights Below (Patreon)

Now that the Maxon Spring Launch streams available, I wanted to share this brief What's New in Redshift 3.5. This does not cover everything new as there is also a new Material Layer node which is energy conserving among other things, but to summarize the feature highlights as of late.

1: Launch of Redshift CPU + Hybrid mode (Or XPU as it works on any device.) Cinema 4D includes Redshift CPU for free, and 5 Extra Render node license. This is the initial release but opens a lot of doors for large and small studios with CPU farms, and working on very large scenes which were not possible before on GPU VRAM. It has feature parity with RS GPU already (except round corners) and should look perceptually identical.

2: New Standard Surface Material, major overhaul of the uber shader greatly improving quality and artist friendliness, adds new features like thin film, and even a new energy conserving diffuse roughness model (d'Eon Lambert Spheres) not found in other renderers yet. Easy to use Single and Multi-scatter SSS. This is modeled after the Autodesk Standard Surface Spec, you can read about how it works here. https://autodesk.github.io/standard-surface/

3: Energy Conservation has been overhauled and is now very high quality, most noticeable in rough metals and transmissive objects.

4: UserData Strings which arrived right before the launch of 3.5

5: Cinema 4D viewport, nodes, and performance enhancements.

6: USD / Alembic Procedurals continued development.

7: Several RSRT improvements, including Multi-scatter SSS, DOF, Particle Primitive, and more.

8: AMD support for Windows and Linux is around the corner, and is already feature complete in the tests I have done. It will be shown at NAB in a few days running on some AMD workstations. It will be available for all Redshift customers very soon.

9: New Material Layer node with proper energy conservation and fresnel response.

10: New IORtoMetalTints utility node to convert Advanced IOR values into something you can pipe into the Standard Surface node using the generic Metalness workflow.

I am sure people will have plenty of questions, feel free to ask here in the comments or the official Redshift forums below. There are already a lot of users experimenting and nejoying the new material, it is really fun to use and I look forward to seeing what people create with it. Enjoy!