Maxon releases Redshift 2025.4
Maxon has released Redshift 2025.4, the latest version of the GPU renderer for VFX, motion graphics and visualization work.
It’s a sizeable update, adding support for new open material standard OpenPBR, plus separate sets of new features for 3ds Max, Blender, Cinema 4D, Houdini, Katana and Maya users.
Image by Ian Robinson.
New OpenPBR material ubershader
The key change in Redshift 2025.4 is support for new open material standard OpenPBR, in the shape of the new OpenPBR Material.
OpenPBR, intended as a unified successor to both the Autodesk Standard Surface and the Adobe Standard Material, is now used as the default material in both 3ds Max and Maya.
Redshift’s own implementation “follows the organization” of the OpenPBR Surface spec, but with some additional options for fine control of render output.
Easier to add fuzz and surface dust than with the Redshift Standard material
Maxon describes working with the new OpenPBR Material as having “many similarities” to Redshift’s Standard material, but there are differences, notably to the handling of surface effects.
Whereas the Standard material has a topmost clear Coat layer over a Sheen layer, in the new OpenPBR material, Fuzz is the topmost BRDF layer.
Maxon describes it as “an excellent BSDF to add micro fuzz or micro dust layering”.
Other changes to the core renderer
Related changes in Redshift 2025.4 include a new Surface Tangent node, used to control anisotropy within the OpenPBR Material; and a new Energy preserving Oren-Nayar (EON) BRDF.
The latter, which generates more realistic lighting on materials with high Roughness values than the standard Oren-Nayar (ON) model, is also available as an option in the Standard material.
Other changes to the core renderer include a new Rotation control in the Maxon Noise shader.
An Evermotion scene converted from Corona and rendered in Redshift for 3ds Max using the Scene Converter.
New features for 3ds Max, Blender, Cinema 4D, Maya and Houdini users
Redshift 2025.4 also features number of changes specific to the individual host applications.
3ds Max users get the option to convert scenes created for Chaos’s Corona and V-Ray renderers to native Redshift shaders and lights via the Scene Converter tool.
Blender users get new options, including object overrides, when importing or exporting Redshift Proxies.
Cinema 4D users get support for Redshift material baking for viewport previews, which is intended to display materials more accurately than the previous Draft mode.
However, there are still some limitations: baking runs on the CPU alone, and does not yet support object- or world-space projection, while subsurface scattering and roughness are only partially supported.
Houdini and Katana users get support for USD Variants in the USD procedural, and support for per-vertex color and scalar attributes on hair primitives.
Maya users get support for the Redshift Material Viewer inside Maya’s Hypershade, for quickly dialing in the look of a material; and the option to load Alembic files with a Redshift Proxy.
Price and system requirements
Redshift 2025.4 is compatible with Windows 10+, glibc 2.28+ Linux and macOS 13.3+.
The renderer’s integration plugins are compatible with 3ds Max 2018+, Blender 3.1+, Cinema 4D R25+, Houdini 18.5+, Katana 4.5+ and Maya 2018+ (Maya 2022+ on Linux).
The software is rental-only, with subscriptions costing $46/month or $264/year.
Read a full list of changes in Redshift 2025.4 on the Redshift forum
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