I am – besides other things – a C4D & Redshift user. The problem is that Maxon not only bought Redshift some years ago, they also switched their whole software to an extremely customer-hostile subscription model. I have no problems with subscription models per se, if they are fair, but basically they way too often take the user’s projects hostage, if you stop paying the subscription ransom money you are no longer able to open older projects if you stop the subscription. That’s why I prefer perpetual licenses, that way you can open the projects with the software you bought als long as you want. In addition Maxon support represenatives promised me software updates for perpetual C4D licenses for roughly the same price I paid for the maintenance contract. But they lied, the updates got around 200 Euros more expensive.

So I am very reluctant to give Maxon any more money in the future. But I am still a big fan of the Redshift render engine, so I thought about using the Redshift plugin for Blender.

What a pain. The installation of 3.5.13 for Blender 3.4.1 did not work, I got cryptic error messages. The guy coding the plugin tried to help in the official forums. Also another guy called “adrian”, also from Maxon, chimed in in the thread giving completely senseless answers. After a day of unsuccessfully trying to install and false infos by “adrian” I uninstalled Redshift and reinstalled, that solved the problem. Earlier “Adrian” accused me of using a “nonstandard installation”, because he interpreted the info I gave completely wrong. Actually I just used the provided installer, there was no “custom installation” at all.

Then I tried to import a Redshift proxy into Blender. It did not show up, no visible error messages. After another day of communication it turned out that Redshift for Blender hat problems resolving the path to my NAS and was not able to fetch the materials. The info given on how to solve this was the exact opposite of what I had to do, set a checkmark at “relative files” in the Blender load dialogue.

In the IPR, the Redshift interactive render view, the proxy only shows up with a lot of luck. They said this is a known problem (and it looks like it is for quite some time). How they think it is possible or even user-friendly to place or use RS proxies that way is beyond me.

I loaded a hdri into the RS dome light. If I try to change gamma on the HDR texture Redshift for Blender (the IPR) becomes unresponsible for ten seconds.

If I add a distant light into the scene it is not actually a distant light, but a sun object, that behaves completely different fomr the distant light in C4D. Lighting the scene the same way as in C4D gave ugly-looking result, metal shaders in the proxy looked like cheap plastic and nice lighting was nearly impossible. The whole UI and viewport gets clunky, and it’s not my system with a Ryzen 7, 32 GB RAM and a RTX 3090.

Working with this was a big pain. Redshift for Blender is neither production ready nor user-friendly. I gave up after wasting two full days with this. Cycles renders just fine. It is WAY faster to import an fbx, relink the textures and tweak the shaders than trying to beat Redshift into submission. Yeah, it renders faster than Cycles, but Eevee is evolving every day (and Redshift RT goes nowhere).

Thanks to Pedro A. for trying to help, anyway. He did a far better job than Maxons “Adrian” that tried to blame everything on me.