Hello folks, In March of last year, 2 colleagues and I left our jobs as software developers in the games industry to form our own company - Redshift. Our goal was to apply our experience with graphics hardware to the problem of "offline" rendering. Artists friends had been asking us for years why Mental Ray and other renderers were not taking advantage of the GPU. As the ideas bounced around in our heads, we figured we'd take a crack at it. As it turns out, it's really freakin' hard, but not impossible!
Today, we're very excited to announce the official launch of Redshift v0.1 alpha, to our knowledge, the world's first fully GPU-accelerated biased renderer. Redshift supports multiple GI solutions: Brute-Force GI, Irradiance Caching (aka Final Gather), Irradiance Point Cloud (aka Light Cache) and Photon Mapping (GI and Caustics). All are fully GPU-accelerated and perform many times faster than similar CPU-based offerings. A problem that plagues many GPU renderers on the market is that they are limited by the available VRAM on the graphics card (and most systems have significantly less VRAM than main memory). Redshift addresses this by using an out-of-core architecture for geometry and textures allowing you to render scenes with tens of millions of polygons and gigabytes of textures with off-the-shelf, inexpensive hardware. Redshift currently integrates directly with Softimage 2011 through 2013 and Maya 2011 through 2013 on Windows XP or higher. 3ds Max support is in development. To run Redshift, you'll need an NVidia graphics card supporting compute 1.2 or higher with 1GB VRAM or more. You can check out our website http://www.redshift3d.com for more info. We're currently in closed alpha, and looking to find some interested alpha testers on this list. Our goals for alpha are to shake out bugs and gather feedback from users to help focus our development efforts. If you're interested in taking Redshift for a spin, drop me an email at [email protected]. Some sample renders: http://s3.redshift3d.com/jp_studio_icp_1280.png http://s3.redshift3d.com/mazda_1024.png http://s3.redshift3d.com/AI_V8_S10_1200.png And the classroom scene from the "Octane Render" thread from a couple weeks ago. 2 minutes on a single GeForce GTX 470. http://s3.redshift3d.com/classroom.png I'd also like to thank all of those on this list who've answered my various questions about the XSI SDK. Your help has made our integration of Redshift with Softimage very strong. Cheers! Nicolas
