Redshift is Annoyingly Awesome

 

Original was 2132x1200 and it finished way too fast =.=.  Sorcery!

You know when you're skeptical about something that others just won't shut up about and then you finally cave in only to end up getting irritated with yourself for not trying it sooner because that thing turned out to be freaking awesome?  Yep! Happened to me!  I sat there feeling confused at the speed, annoyed at the quality and guilty because it was so easy to set up. Sheer witchcraft!


My near potato Geforce 660 GTX was cranking out beautifully lit, noise free, high resolution frames in a fraction of the time I'd expect.  All this while not even knowing how to really optimize the engine yet!  I do appreciate that some of the settings resemble that of Mental Ray so I'm not completely stranded in unfamiliar waters.  The architectural material attributes do appear pretty similar and since it's such a general purpose shader, it helped my learning gain a bit of momentum.

Positions switched around a bit but close

Tweaks were easy because the feedback was so fast.  The scene was lit using physical sky, irradiance cache and a single portal light.  The brute force method gave a slightly more natural looking result but of course, was a bit slower, especially with the amount of noise you'll need to eliminate.  Still even that was faster than I expected.

Original was 2079x2952 @  50mins 42secs

So far the only issue that irks me is the lack of support for the switch nodes as I use triple switches often when working with sets of furniture.  Yeah I can and did duplicate the materials and that works, its just a bit inefficient.

:( Arch Viz would be so much more convenient with this.

Another thing was the lack of single click functionality to add renderable cameras.  However I did find a workaround, and that was to switch to Mental Ray temporarily, add renderable cameras there and switch back to Redshift, the cameras stay!  This leaves me to believe there is some UI script somewhere that can be edited to make the option available for Redshift.

At least renderable cameras made in Mental Ray transfer over

In this shot I wanted to try the Redshift bokeh node.  And I think I fell in love with it's "power" attribute.  Basically the higher the value, the more defined the edges of the blur appear, like a hardened fringe.  Personally, I really like that particular look for DoF and you can see it in the highlights on faucets. 

Without textures my soap bars really look like chewy candy ha!

Obviously this is the demo but I'm thoroughly intrigued to test it out even more since it's not functionally limited in anyway other than the watermarks (which I don't find to that intrusive to be honest).  I'll also be trying Octane but Redshift is shaping up to be a great renderer and chances are, I'm totally biased now.

Edit: 4/28/2016

Figured I'd add this shot with the soap textures.

I'm a sucker for artisan soaps >.>