THE TRANSITION FROM PHYSICAL, TO CORONA, TO OCTANE, TO REDSHIFT
Render Wars
Today, I wanted to share with you some of my personal insights and decisions I had to do over the years when it comes to working with third party renderers in Cinema 4D. How I got into using different renderers and the organic transitions I personally had while switching.
My goal here, is not to emphasize the use of a particular render engine, nor to criticize another, but just to share my reasoning behind my needs and workflow habits.
I started working with Cinema 4D about 4 years ago now, back then, the standard and physical renderer were kind of the way to go for most of us, since third party renderers were not really adopted or implemented as they should for a stable workflow in Cinema. Even tho V-ray has always been a must have renderer option for Archviz artists, it was still all CPU based and slow for must of us, and personally for me, working with an intel 4 core without hyper-threading.
Physical Renderer
Working with the Physical Renderer has always been a frustration for me, due to the slow feedback and the amount of test renders I had to send in the render view just to preview the smallest change in my scenes.
I never really questioned this render engine, because it was working out of the box and doing pretty much everything, and to be honest, it was the only render engine I knew back then.
Despite my slow running machine, I ended up doing around 340 projects using the physical render engine, all part of my Everydays project I started in 2016. Apart from uploading the C4D project files on the site, I was also posting a screenshot of my final render time, just to share my waiting frustration with the community downloading my files.
Corona Renderer
Nowadays Corona have had a significant overhaul, with his node based system and it’s denoiser (GPU accelerated). I haven’t had the chance to play around the new update, but it’s a render engine I definitely loved and would use again at some point. I ended up doing 35 projects using Corona before switching again onto another render engines.
Octane Renderer
I had just upgraded my Graphics card with a new 1050ti, and it was finally time to go full GPU.
Of course, going GPU and seeing for myself the difference in speed and in my workflow was just amazing.
Once you go GPU, you will never look back. It is probably one of the biggest leap the motion design industry had during the last couple years, a real game changer. At this point, to be honest, GPU acceleration has become a must have in most softwares, it has become essential in everyone’s workflow, and most of all, for the well-being of our own sanity.
For me personally, Octane brought me a new way of working inside of Cinema 4D with its live render view. Lighting and texturing became fun again to play with. Scattering objects, node systems, denoising renders and fog options is something most Octane users can’t go without.
I ended up doing 355 projects using Octane. As fun as it was, there was always some minor issues and frustrations I kept getting while using Octane most of the time. From the constant crashes to the minor updates, that I still don’t really understand, I just needed something more stable to work with.
Redshift Renderer
In retrospect
Stability > Versatility > Speed
Keep on Rendering
Constantin Paschou (The French Monkey)