System - Live

Enabled

When enabled, Redshift Live will present your scene in a temporary state without waiting for all shaders and textures to finish processing, this allows you to get visual feedback more quickly at the expense of visual accuracy. The scene will update automatically as each remaining shader and texture finishes processing in the background until the entire scene is fully processed and up to date. During this time, you can still navigate through and interact with your scene.

Asynchronous Asset Streaming accomplished this in two ways, by temporarily using a clay shader for any material that has yet to be compiled and by temporarily using a low resolution dummy texture until the high resolution texture is compressed and displayed.

When disabled, Redshift Live will wait until all shaders and textures are processed before updating the render view.

Abort on License Failure

When enabled, it aborts rendering when Redshift licensing fails. 

Abort on Missing Resources

When enabled, it aborts rendering when the scene is missing resources like textures and other external references.

Scene Distance Units

When enabled, Redshift is fully unit aware. Lights that use physical units and shading effects based on physical phenomena like subsurface scattering behave realistically and are managed automatically. Redshift also manages proxy export and import based on scene units, so you can transfer an asset built in Houdini in meters to Cinema 4D in centimeters without hassle. This is the default and recommended setting for best results and ease of use.

When disabled, Redshift uses an outdated form of scene unit management. Requiring more manual intervention when converting to scenes of different scales and managing parameters like Photometric Units to Meter Scale and cd/m^2 Factor.

Distance Units

Defines how the numerical values stored in the scene are interpreted. Changing the Distance Units effectively changes the scale of the scene and the intensity of the lights. However, please note, some parameters scale while others do not when changing the scene units.

• What doesn't scale:
  • Parameters with fixed units that define physical phenomena like Transmission Depth
  • Lights that use physical Units like Lumens or Watts
  • A parameter driven by a Unit Conversion node in "Fixed" mode
• What scales:
  • Lights that use the Unit type "Image"
  • Parameters that use scene units for driving artistic effects like an Ambient Occlusion's Max Distance
  • A parameter driven by a Unit Conversion node in "Scene Units" mode

Distance Scale

Controls how the scene values are interpreted with greater precision. While Distance Units defines the unit, the Distance Scale option can be used to set the scaling factor to an even more exacting degree.

Image Units Scale

Scales the intensity of lights that use the "Image" unit type. The "Image" unit is used to represent lights in an artistic way, not strictly based on a physically accurate light unit, because of this the intensity can be scaled here. The default values are chosen for the most familiar results in each DCC.

Photometric Units to Meter Scale

Certain features of Redshift such as photographic exposure, physical sun/sky and IES light support require knowledge of the "units to meter" and "candela to square meter" settings. It's important to set these values correctly, otherwise lighting coming from physical light sources might appear too dim or too bright.

If you're working with centimeters (i.e. 1 world unit is 1 centimeter), the units to meter scale should be set to 100. That's because, in this case, 100 world units means 100cm, which means 1 meter. If you're working with meters, then it should be set to 1, because 1 world unit means 1 meter.

cd/m^2 Factor

Photographic exposure, IES lights and the physical sky/sun use the cd/m^2 (candela to square meter) setting. Please make sure to attach a photographic exposure lens shader when using IES lights and physical sun/sky, otherwise your lighting will appear too bright or too dim.

Non-Inverse-Square Light Decay

When enabled - by default, it forces Redshift to employ a hack exclusively for lights that have linear or no decay ( non-physically correct decay)  in order to make this kind of decay look ‘nicer’ when the surface that is being lit is very close to the light source, but it is not actually correct.

When this hack is disabled, the fall-off can get darker when the distance from the light is less than 1 unit, which is actually mathematically correct.

Time Behavior

When enabled, Redshift uses an old version of time management.

When disabled - by default, Redshift uses a new version of time management that enables new features like the looping functionality in a Maxon Noise shader.

GI Conserve Reflection Energy for Photon Caustics

Conserve Reflection Energy (CRE) is a Global Illumination feature that approximates the look of caustics by simulating very soft bounces of light. While the CRE effect looks nice without caustics, when rendering with caustics the effect is redundant and decreases the contrast provided by actual caustics.

When enabled and rendering with Photon Caustics, Conserve Reflection Energy is enabled resulting in a less accurate render by simulating fake caustics and real caustics at the same time.

When disabled and rendering with Photon Caustics, Conserve Reflection Energy is disabled resulting in a more accurate render where only real caustics are used.

GI CRE for Photon Caustics: Enabled Old behavior	Disabled New behavior

Area Light Visibility

When disabled, by default, area and dome lights are less dependent on their camera visibility offering more control over scene lighting. For example, a light can be invisible to camera rays (Camera contribution 0) and still visible in transmissive refractions.

When enabled, lights revert to their visibility behavior in 2025.2 and older. When a light is invisible to camera rays it is also invisible to transmissive rays.

Texture Streaming VRAM Budget

The percentage of VRAM that can be allocated for texture streaming.