your Cg problems solved
Mona Denton, USA
This month, using Redshift proxies, moving between DAZ Studio and Zbrush, making bubbles, a jellyfish and speeding up arch-vis renders
Cinema 4D is great at many things, but it can slow down when it has a lot of objects in the scene; a real problem when rendering geometry.
Redshift, the Gpu-powered, biased render engine, has become popular with many 3D artists because of its blistering fast render speed and ability to handle much more geometry than other GPU render solutions. The integration of Redshift into Cinema 4D doesn’t just give users a quick render engine – with the use of Redshift Proxies the creation process can be vastly sped up as well.
If you are familiar with using Xrefs in Cinema 4D, Redshift Proxies work in a similar way. A Redshift Proxy is an embedded link within a master Cinema 4D file to an external .rs file, which can be created from another Cinema 4D scene.
The Proxy file has a much lower memory overhead than having the actual geometry within the master Cinema 4D scene. This means viewport speed is vastly improved, admittedly with the loss of viewport texture colour, which will hopefully be addressed in an update for the plug-in.
Proxies can be either still or animated scenes. Where Redshift Proxies are really useful is for geometry-heavy elements, which are only of secondary importance to the scene, for example trees and foliage.
Redshift Proxies in Cinema 4D offer several advantages over the native instancing tools. Aside from the better viewport and render speed, a Redshift Proxy offers the ability to reference different materials within the master scene by changing the prefix of a material.
Using this is perfect for cars, rocks, crowds as well as various types of foliage where one Redshift Proxy in the Object List can be duplicated many times in the master scene. Each Redshift Proxy duplicate is then assigned its own material set, which when mixed with Cinema 4D’s mograph tools, can allow a lot of variation in a scene with the minimal amount of geometry being loaded.
If the Redshift Proxy is from an animated Cinema 4D file, the specific frames required can easily be selected in the master Cinema 4D scene.
If you are a Redshift and Cinema 4D user, learning to get the most from Redshift Proxies can speed up your workflow and reduce the computational load of your scene.