There have been 3 major render engine updates rolled out to the farm in the past 48 hours. Corona, Redshift, and Arnold all got major version bumps in varying render apps. Some of the details are:
- Corona v5 in all Max and C4D instances (the latter of which got the hotfix 2 install)
- Redshift 3.0.16 across all instances of Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, and Houdini
- Arnold 3.0.1.2 in C4D R19-21, 4.0.1.44 in Max 2018 and 2019, and 4.0.1.1 in Maya 2018 and 2019
The newer Redshift build required a newer Nvidia driver deployed to the GPU farm, even though the previously deployed driver was only 3.5 months old. Rather magically, and completely unexpectedly, Redshift 3.0.16 now works in our Cinema 4D R21 instances. We’re at a loss for words with that one, but we’re happy it’s working now. As to the move to the “experimental” Redshift build, that is a departure from our normal procedures. We’ve held off on the 3.x builds for quite a while due to the build naming, but many of our users have been requesting 3.x for the past few months. While we typically don’t deploy beta or experimental builds within the “stable” instances of render applications, Redshift is a bit of an exception. There hasn’t, historically, been a concerted effort to yield a stable build within a major version number of Redshift. The development cycle has routinely added new features as minor point releases increment. This has resulted in new or regression bugs at times, thereby reducing the effectiveness of the “stable” nomenclature. When it comes to Redshift, it’s reasonably clear that you simply run a build. The major or minor version number is only relevant to tell you what does and/or does not work in that specific build. The major version number is not truly indicative of stability.
Of course we hope that all of these render engine updates maintain backwards compatibility with scenes created with older releases. There remains the possibility of there being differences in rendered output, however, so please compare your versions to our versions deployed if you are seeing mild visual differences in the rendered output.
Render Endlessly!
