For those who do not know the tool: Redshift is Maxon’s GPU renderer for VFX, motion graphics, animation, and visualization. It is available for DCC applications including Cinema 4D, Houdini, Maya, and 3ds Max.

Maxon has released Redshift 2026.4. The update introduces Redshift Live, a new real-time render mode that replaces Redshift RT, and adds support for Vectorworks 2026 Update 4. The release marks a clear product shift. Redshift Live is intended as the new interactive rendering layer inside Redshift, with Maxon positioning it for look development and architectural visualization. That makes 2026.4 more than a routine feature drop. It is a directional release.

The current implementation is still limited. External reporting notes that Redshift Live does not yet support features such as subsurface scattering, hair, texture displacement, point clouds, volumes, motion blur, depth of field, light linking, or AOVs. For now, it is a real-time mode with a defined scope, not a full replacement for the production renderer.

The Vectorworks angle matters just as much. Support for Vectorworks 2026 Update 4 places Redshift more directly inside AEC and planning workflows, where quick visual feedback is increasingly expected. In that sense, Redshift Live and Vectorworks support belong to the same story.

Outside the real-time changes, Redshift 2026.4 also adds support for per-polygon materials with texture displacement, support for non-0-1 UVs for texture displacement, a new shader input for the RS Dome Light Material, and a light normalization mode for Physical Sun & Sky covering sun and moon lighting and camera contribution.

Cinema 4D users also get expanded Physical Sky features. Maxon says the system can now render stars, the Milky Way, and the moon. The release also adds conversion from Redshift Standard materials to OpenPBR materials, extending material workflow compatibility.

Taken together, Redshift 2026.4 is less important for any single checkbox than for what it signals. Redshift RT is gone. Redshift Live takes its place. Vectorworks support broadens the target market. The rest of the release improves the core renderer in smaller, more practical ways. Maxon is not just updating Redshift. It is repositioning it.

Maxon release notes:
https://support.maxon.net/hc/en-us/articles/8814051767964-Redshift-2026-4-0-2026-03-March-17-2026

The post Redshift 2026.4 adds Redshift Live and expands support for Vectorworks first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Redshift is a GPU renderer built for fast lookdev and final frames. Vectorworks is a BIM (Building Information Modeling) and CAD hub where buildings get drafted and organised.

Architectural visualisation pipelines love a clean handoff, but they hate the part where you wait for it. Redshift for Archviz positions itself as a single-environment loop: preview inside your BIM tool, iterate while the model still feels editable, then render without rebuilding the whole look in a second app.

The core pitch is direct integration with Vectorworks, aimed at letting artists and designers stay in the same workspace while moving from real-time previews to final renders. The platform targets the usual ArchViz pressure points: quick iterations, look development that stays consistent from draft to final, and visuals that survive client meetings without the dreaded “we will render it later” disclaimer. Maxon describes this as an expansion of the same rendering technology used in its existing ecosystem, tuned for real-world, real-time architecture design workflows

Real-time lighting that behaves like a grown-up

In the feature set, the real-time preview leans hard into lighting, materials, and environment response. The toolset includes controls to change the time of day, sun position, and cloud cover, to show how natural light interacts with the design as you adjust conditions.

Cloud cover control is quite precise, spanning conditions from clear to fully overcast, specifically to visualize how clouds affect natural light, shadows, and the overall mood of an architectural render. That kind of environment knob matters because it ties directly to decision-making. When lighting direction and softness update instantly, material choices stop being theoretical and start becoming compositional tools.

Assets, materials, and the eternal fight against empty rooms

The content side is framed around libraries that help you get to “inhabited space” faster. A growing asset library includes materials, lights, and ready-to-use assets intended to speed up scene building while keeping physical accuracy and visual consistency.

On top of that, the feature descriptions call out drag-and-drop population of interiors and exteriors with a selection that includes furniture, vehicles, realistic plants, and people, and these assets interact naturally with surfaces.

Material coverage is physically correct, spanning concrete and metal through glass, wood, and textiles, with the promise that materials react naturally to light and environment. The workflow emphasis stays on applying, adjusting, and previewing changes in real time, so look development can happen while you are still shaping the design.

Mac and Windows parity, right from the start

Platform coverage is plain: Redshift for Archviz is available for Windows and macOS, andfeature parity across both platforms from the outset. That matters whether you bounce between machines in a studio or your clients do. It also matters if your pipeline includes artists who bring their own gear and do not want a surprise feature gap halfway through a project.

The Cinema 4D escape hatch for the fancy stuff

When a still image turns into a walkthrough, you need more than a preview window. The workflow includes the ability to send a project to Cinema 4D with a simple click, with the intent of enabling more advanced architectural visualisation work, including procedural animations and simulations.

The FAQ describes export from the Redshift for Archviz plugin to Cinema 4D, and states that geometry, materials, cameras, and basic lighting generally transfer well. Once in Cinema 4D, refining scenes, materials, and lighting with a higher level of control is as usual, and then extending the project with animation and simulation.

This is a practical bridge for teams who want the speed of in-app previs but still need a DCC stage for shot craft, camera choreography, or heavier scene management. It also keeps the promise of visual continuity: the same scene, lighting, and materials across preview and final output.

Installation and the beta-shaped reality

The tooling around installation is explicit enough to be useful. The install notes state that the current availability is for Vectorworks, with Revit and Archicad coming soon.

For the Vectorworks side, the guide references installing Vectorworks 2026 using default settings, downloading and signing into the Maxon App, installing an AEC Viewer, then activating the plugin inside the host application by customising the workspace and adding the Redshift entry from the Rendering category. Launch is a Auto Synch button inside the host environment. Use requires creating a MyMaxon account and accepting an EULA. The subscription bundle (Plans and Pricing) supports multiple instances with up to eight GPUs on a single computer.

Because this is new workflow territory, treat early adoption like you treat any new renderer, plugin, or bridge. Run a proper test scene, push the corner cases, and validate the round-trip before you bet a deadline on it. Do that before you put it into production.

What this means for working artists

The practical story is simple: real-time previews inside a BIM host, asset and material libraries geared at architectural scenes, cross-platform support on Windows and macOS, and a pipeline bridge into Cinema 4D for animation and simulation.

If you live in the overlap between design and storytelling, this kind of integration can reduce handoffs and shorten iteration loops. If you live in the overlap between client expectations and physics-based lighting, real-time environment controls can turn “maybe” into “yes” quickly.

Just remember the unglamorous part: new tools and innovations should be tested before use in production, even when the marketing copy sounds like it was written by a very confident sunbeam.

https://www.maxon.net/en/article/maxon-introduces-new-real-time-rendering-and-cinematic-previews-solution-for-architects

The post Maxon ships Redshift for Archviz first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Chaos develops V-Ray, one of the most widely used production renderers, and Vantage, its real-time GPU path tracer. Together they form a rendering ecosystem used in VFX, architecture and product design. While V-Ray handles final offline rendering, Vantage enables instant GPU-based previews.

Real-time rendering directly in the viewport

The update introduces two key integrations. Houdini gains a Vantage Hydra Delegate, a fully path-traced, real-time renderer that streams pixel-accurate output straight into the Houdini viewport. Artists can use familiar camera and scene controls while working with physically correct lighting and materials. Maya receives an expanded Vantage Live Link that mirrors the same approach. It streams path-traced frames directly into Maya’s viewport. Live Link now also supports Linux and macOS through remote rendering connections, making the integration platform-independent across major production systems. Vantage 3.1 supports USD and MaterialX, ensuring shading and geometry consistency throughout a production pipeline. Artists can evaluate layout, lookdev and previs at full fidelity without test renders or external exports.

Real-time simulation and visual feedback

Chaos has added a real-time fluid simulator within Vantage. It supports interactive smoke, fire and fog previews, enabling fast iteration for explosions, exhaust trails or atmospheric effects. These can be evaluated interactively in Lookdev or Previs without resorting to slow caches or offline rendering passes. This feature links to V-Ray and Maya, allowing smoke and fire simulations to be reviewed instantly in the viewport with physically correct lighting and shadow behaviour.

V-Ray 7.2: new features for Maya and Houdini

Alongside the viewport integration, Chaos released V-Ray 7 Update 2 for both Maya and Houdini. In Maya, the release adds a new V-Ray Displacement Material system that allows complex displacements to be blended across different materials, applied to single V-Ray Proxy objects, and exported as independent texture maps. The update also introduces a Night Sky tool that generates physically accurate star fields and lunar lighting based on geolocation, date and time. This makes day-to-night timelapses and creative celestial setups possible without relying on external HDRIs.

Maya artists also gain access to several AI-driven tools in beta, including the AI Enhancer, AI Material Generator and AI Upscaler. These allow artists to create PBR materials directly from photographs, automatically enhance secondary assets such as vegetation or people, and upscale renders up to 16K resolution. In addition, Gaussian Splats clipping has been introduced, enabling selective editing of scanned environments without the need to regenerate data sets.

For Houdini users, the update brings a Pyro-ready volume shader designed for realistic fire, smoke and explosion rendering. Volume sampling has been optimised for faster performance, and the renderer now supports Deep output, matte rendering and extended light path expressions, providing more flexibility for compositing workflows. V-Ray also extends USD compatibility to versions 0.33 through 0.34.5 and expands its Distributed Rendering 2 system to remove the previous machine limit for network rendering. Procedural hair rendering in Solaris now delivers consistent results, aided by a new Cubic Samples parameter that gives artists finer control over hair tessellation. The update also adds resolution-independent bump mapping, ensuring consistent shading across output resolutions, and acceleration blur support, which improves motion blur accuracy for accelerating or decelerating objects.

Practical considerations

For lookdev, layout and animation, the ability to preview path-traced results directly in the viewport can reduce iteration times significantly. Artists no longer need to export intermediate renders, allowing faster visual feedback during creative decisions. However, Chaos classifies several features, such as AI-based tools, as beta. Real-time rendering remains GPU-intensive and depends on scene scale, lighting complexity and hardware performance. As always, stability and performance should be evaluated before adopting these tools in a production pipeline.

Pricing and availability

V-Ray 7 for Maya Update 2, V-Ray 7 for Houdini Update 2, Vantage 3.1, and the Vantage Hydra Delegate are available now for Windows, macOS and Linux. The Hydra Delegate requires a Vantage licence but does not need a V-Ray licence and can operate with any renderer. Licences can be purchased individually or as part of the Chaos M&E Collection, which includes V-Ray, Vantage, Phoenix, Player, Anima, Cosmos and Scans in one subscription. Current pricing is listed on the Chaos pricing page.

Download Chaos Vantage 3, update 1

Download Vantage Hydra Delegate builds for Houdini* (An active Chaos Vantage license and a clean installation of the Vantage Hydra Delegate build are required to run the plugin in Houdini. Users who have an older Vantage version installed should download the latest version.)

Download V-Ray 7 Maya, update 2

Download V-Ray 7 Houdini, update 2

The post Real-time Chaos: Vantage now inside Maya and Houdini first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Blender 5.0 has entered its release candidate stage, signalling that the open-source 3D suite is only days away from full release. The RC phase runs until 18 November 2025, after which the final build will be issued if no critical bugs emerge.

What’s coming?

Among the major changes are full integration of the ACES 1.3 and 2.0 colour management systems, giving artists more accurate tone-mapping and consistent colour handling across production pipelines. Cycles receives additional rendering refinements, improving sampling performance and light path accuracy. The Compositor gains expanded node functionality and faster feedback, while Geometry Nodes continue to grow with broader procedural modelling capabilities.

https://twitter.com/Blender/status/1988928919479705786

The user interface has also undergone refinement, targeting consistency across editors and providing clearer access to scene and node controls. Together, these updates aim to enhance usability and fidelity without altering Blender’s open, modular workflow philosophy.

The release candidate can be downloaded via Blender’s build portal, and users are invited to provide final testing feedback through the official Blender Survey 2025 before the version is locked for release. Blender 5.0’s final release is expected shortly after 18 November 2025.

The post Blender 5.0 hits release candidate! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

When a group of architectural illustrators set out to test Chaos Vantage, they planned a few small real-time experiments. Instead, they built Unbox, a fully animated short film where an architectural cube folds open like a mechanical puzzle. From “a few little minis,” it grew bigger – there are worse outcomes for a stress test.

DP: What was the initial spark for testing Chaos Vantage and why risk it on a narrative short instead of a comfy archviz sizzle?

Peter Stulz: Honestly, at first we intended to do a few little minis in Vantage… and then the second test spinned out of control and grew bigger each day. But no regrets, we embraced the prospect to develop a narrative architectural piece ourselves.

You see, we are architects and not an animation studio. So this was a massive learning journey for us: sequencing shots in an attractive manner, telling a story, how to reveal information and how to retain it… Vantage was fantastic, because it allowed us to be quite experimental here, make mistakes and learn while working on it.

DP: Give us the pipeline in one breath: DCC(s), renderers, interchange (Alembic/FBX/USD), and the editorial path from storyboard/animatic to picture lock.

Peter Stulz: Natively we use 3ds Max in our studio, still the main tool for architecture. Our studio mostly renders in Corona Render, but I feel very home in Vray. For asset creation I use Blender which then sent to Max via FBX. The animation was rendered in Vray CPU – 5 months was tight enough and I know Vray as an engine that delivers without funky surprises.

For the creative part, I drew initial sketches and the storyboard in Procreate. We were lucky to have my friend and cinematographer Olaf Aue (LinkedIn) on board, who was kind enough to share some of his Know-How. The storyboard was straight away sequenced in Resolve with some stand-in SFX and music, just to get a feeling for timing. The stills were then replaced with Vantage Previz shots; the iteration frequency could be kept fastpaced due to Vantage, that was a tremendous relief. Finally for that project we also familiarized ourselves just enough with character creator and Iclone to pull off a somewhat decent protagonist – which then is mostly kept out of focus anyhow :).

Depth of field and lighting are crucial in linear storytelling formats. Vantage allows for having these available during the early layout phase, enabling us to evaluate the flow and precise timing of edits early on, resulting in fewer iterations and more streamlined communication, features that Olaf, as a cinematographer, found lacking in the animation feature films he previously worked on.

DP: Hardware reality check: what exactly were the two workstations (CPU/GPU/VRAM/RAM/storage), and how did that cap scene size, proxies, and iteration speed?

Peter Stulz: There are two parts to this, the GPU and CPU specs: For working with Vantage, I had a 4060TI with 16GB. It was mainly the ground displacement in Vantage that was the key factor for VRAM necessity. Otherwise Vantage is smart when scaling to smaller GPUs. You don’t need massive GPUs to get started with Vantage.

For the final CPU rendering – we have several AMD 9950x in our studio with 64GB Ram, totally unspectacular workstations. In fact rendering moved between machines, whatever was available, the bottleneck was that we had just two render licenses available. Another thing, that I really appreciate about Vray CPU – it stays pretty consistent even if you throw in an older architecture.

DP: How did you keep the master scene nimble?

Peter Stulz: 3ds Max can become a real chore, when scenes get too heavy. I wholeheartedly hate unresponsive scenes – anything that breaks the creative flow has to be solved. Technically, there are several approaches: obviously using Proxies for heavy assets is a must; staying parametric if possible also keeps my scenes small; my modifier stacks can get quite impressive and I avoid baking them.

I xref wherever it makes sense, especially if parts of your scene are used in different settings. If I find the time, I localise heavy textures and reduce them – tedious but worth the effort later. Ideally the Master Scene only contains the camera, the lights and a few key assets. All the heavy load is loaded from external files. These scenes mostly are only a few MB in itself – helping with autobackups.

DP: Camera language before pixels: how did boards/animatic evolve once you could “walk the set” in Vantage?

Peter Stulz: It was important to develop a storyboard outside of 3D first to avoid thinking as a 3d designer. The environment was conceived like a sandbox, so we could freely explore the set with different lenses and angles. The superfast iterations we could do with Vantage really helped to test alternatives. That felt very powerful. Obviously some storyboard shots were then adapted or omitted. Vantage was great to secure we are on the right path.

DP: Lighting in Vantage: What translated 1:1 to finals, and where did parity crack?

Peter Stulz: At first it is scarily impressive how close Vantage can feel to the final look. We did a few final shots directly in Vantage and realised afterwards we could have done more in Vantage to prove the point. The extra turntable animation is done 100% in Vantage, but we really had to go deep in the settings to get rid of some flickering.

You have to understand, Vantage works like this: It downscales automatically to achieve close-to realtime speed and then gradually refines the look. But that logic causes limitations: For example GI depth in tricky setups might cause visible flickering. If you want to get rid of unwanted artefacts like these, you have to go deeper into the settings; and then you get these Vray 2010 vibes again :). Apart from that the denoiser might create some artefacts, textures are getting blurry, VDBs were not possible etc.

DP: Materials & lookdev: which shader features were non-negotiable, and what did you simplify for real-time parity?

Peter Stulz: Since we decided to use Vray CPU for finals, we just accepted that some stuff for Previz looked different – we knew it would be ok in the finals. But to answer the question we used Vantage for a another client project and it became clear again: If you want to produce in Vantage you can not set stuff up in Vray and hope for the best. In that case we had a semitranslucent ocean setting and that looked quite diffferent in Vantage and had to be especially adapted.

DP: The moving house: How was it rigged , and what broke first under real-time playback?

Peter Stulz: The architectural cube is in fact one scene with 2000 frames of animation. No cheap tricks – nothing appears magically out of thin air – it’s all in there. Only the initial cube with the rough surface is a different prop because it had a tricky blending shader which was animated ( animating materials in 3ds Max is a disaster …).

The rig for the unfolding was very basic and was built out of a lot of nested helpers. That was the most simple way to avoid the “locked axis” problem. What is this? Well, rigging a rubics cube is in fact not so straightforward as it seems: after a few twists the individual parts start to move quite unexpectedly – try it yourself, it’s actually pretty hard. The nested helpers solved this, now it was a matter of adjusting the right timing; how fast is the right speed for a massive 12m cube? You want to correspond a certain weight without boring the viewer. At the end we sprinkled some subtle secondary movements on top.

DP: Performance metrics: What were typical FPS for look-dev in Vantage and per-shot render times? Both for Vantage previews and V-Ray finals?

Peter Stulz: We could render out playblasts in Vantage (+/- 200 frames) over a toilet break in 1.5k resolution at 1:2.39. For finals in Vray I attempt to stay around 10 minutes / frame. If you want to use Vantage for final quality in FullHD, you crank up the settings to 1 minute / frame. If there was any noise left, the Resolve temporal denoiser is the last polish.

DP: The famous 95%: where did Vantage land “close enough” to V-Ray and what are the missing 5%?

Peter Stulz: Every “resolution” in Vantage is more coarse. I am not only talking textures, but sampling, atmospherics, global illumination. Obviously the denoiser also tends to smear everything. Everything is just lower definition than in Vray / Corona. That’s why oldschool rendering is still very valid to achieve that crispy level of detail.

DP: Editorial rhythm: how often did you re-cut while “shooting in engine,” and what told you a shot was edit-locked before triggering finals?

Peter Stulz: In our case that answer is quite simple: the presentation date was coming up, so we had a very strict timeframe when shots had to be done. Only thing we updated in the last days, we extended a few shots by 30 frames, because they felt rushed in the beta cut. That little change improved the rythm quite substantially.

DP: Pitfalls & fixes: three things that wasted time before you found the trick and what was the trick?

Peter Stulz: Vantage is built in a way that it actually could be used as a standalone loading in VrayScenes. Since I had my friend Olaf Aue as a cinematographer on board we tried to use it in that way. Theoretically that works, but with a lot of drawbacks and very limited editing and getting the changes from Vantage back into 3dsMax is hard.

We omitted that concept and resorted to live link only with 3ds Max. But actually that standalone option is not so bad – Chaos could really focus there more.

DP: If you rebuilt “Unboxed” today at 100% Vantage, what would the delivery plan look like? QC, shot classes that stay real-time, and the shortlist that still goes offline?

Peter Stulz: I know, that there are more shots that could be realised in Vantage directly. But if you plan this, it is smart to set up the whole project more focused on Vantage directly. Switching to Vray, if needed, is easy, the other way can be frustrating.

DP: What did “Unboxed” change in how you scope, price, and pitch real-time narrative work to clients?

Peter Stulz: We can offer fast animation works more easily which don’t need very high quality or are visually suitable for Vantage (clay shots).

DP: Wishlist to Chaos: What are the top parity/features that would let you ship more shots straight out of Vantage next time?

Peter Stulz: I would like easier quality settings if you intend to use Vantage as final renderer. We had to do a lot of tweaking for specific scenes or even change the 3d scene to avoid artefacts. Additionally Vantage ships with specific assets like a water surface or animated plants. These are great, but in LiveLink they are hard to be used, because there is not way to insert them in your Root Scene.

DP: For Vantage newcomers: What is your “first-day” checklist?

Peter Stulz: Familiarize yourself with the basic UI and do some stress tests to find the limits. Additionally I would look for a study project that comes close to a client environment. There is no point in having all the bells and whistles, if in a real production case you are missing the crucial components.

DP: One more hypothetic: with one extra week or one extra GPU, which single area would you invest in—and why?

Peter Stulz: Funny alternatives. As described above a half-decent GPU is good for previz which was the main usage in “Unbox”. Having a week extra is always great – so I would opt for that!

DP: Where exactly did you keep the “cube layer” for the whole piece: did we start life on the Blender Default Cube, and how much of that origin survived?

Peter Stulz: It sure was great that we could hire the mighty default cube as a support role. It didn’t even mind too much to be shipped into another 3d-suite – what a humble character and it really outshined itself in our short. 3d-artists should show more appreciation to have it per default all free!

DP: The cube’s side text: What does it say, and why?

Peter Stulz: The cube text gives instructions how to mix the perfect Daiquiri as it is served on Kepler 5 but it is quite explicit so I can’t go into depths here. But if you look for easter eggs, we have hidden various personal items in the architecture. Talking about audio my friend Olaf had a lot of fun browsing through his SFX library and pull out quite unusual sounds for the cubes inner mechanics.

The post The Cube Moved: Go for the Chaos (Ad) Vantage first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.