Overview
Redshift Proxies allow you to place previously exported
Redshift Proxy Files (.rs) files in your scenes without actually loading the geometry until it is actually needed at render time.
Using proxies has several advantages over in-scene objects, namely:
- Proxies are loaded by Redshift on demand and will therefore only use resources when they are needed (when a ray intersects the proxy's bounding box).
- Proxies have almost no time cost during scene translation. Extracting large amounts of geometry from Maya, 3ds Max Cinema 4D can be slow and using proxies means you pay that cost only once when you export the Redshift Proxy File.
- Proxies are stored in an optimized format on disk so that the renderer can immediately use the data after loading from disk without additional processing or memory overhead.
The main disadvantages of using proxies:
- Making edits to the proxy can be more time consuming than if the original data is part of the scene (as it requires making changes in another file and re-exporting the Redshift Proxy File)
- Proxies cannot be deformed or otherwise modified. For example, you cannot animate components inside a proxy (but you can animate the position, rotation and scale of the proxy as a whole rigid object).
Redshift Proxy Files can contain any number of meshes. In fact, Redshift Proxy Files describe an entire scene and support object types including hair, strands, instances, volume containers, lights and any materials/shaders applied to these objects. A Redshift Proxy Files can even contain other proxies!
Redshift Proxies provide the option to use either the materials embedded in the Redshift Proxy File, or to replace those materials with materials from the scene where the proxy is placed.
Redshift Proxy File s are DCC-independent, so you can export a Redshift Proxy File from Maya and place it as a proxy in Cinema 4D, or vice-versa.
Important Notes
When working with Redshift Proxies, it is helpful to follow these guidelines:
- You cannot retrieve the original 3d app's (Maya, C4D, Houdini, etc) mesh from a Redshift Proxy File, so it is generally advisable to keep the original source data that was used to export the Redshift Proxy.
- When placing multiple copies of a Redshift Proxy in a scene, it is much more efficient for memory and performance to create a single Redshift Proxy and then create multiple instances of this proxy and place them as desired.