Renderworks styles
Several elements combine to create a satisfactory rendering: the selected render mode, the render mode options, the lighting options, the Renderworks camera effects, and the selected Renderworks background. A Renderworks style saves the settings for these parameters as a resource that can be re-applied later and shared between files. Several default Renderworks styles are provided to quickly obtain a variety of looks, with no parameter adjustment or rendering knowledge required.
You can also create custom Renderworks styles and save them as a resource, as described in Creating Renderworks styles. In addition to the Realistic and Artistic types of custom Renderworks styles, which are powered by the Cineware® Engine by Maxon®, we also team with Maxon to provide a Redshift by Maxon rendering type. These rendering types have different strengths and benefits, to meet a variety of presentation needs.
Artistic styles offer a variety of sketch-like and color-blocked options.
The Realistic and Redshift by Maxon styles create photo-realistic renderings, and they interpret lighting and textures differently. The two types offer various rendering options and each supports different features.
Redshift by Maxon
Redshift by Maxon excels at the processing of large models with lots of geometry and complex rendering effects, including blurred reflections, indirect lighting, glow textures, camera effects, and anti-aliasing. In addition to high quality renderings, final quality images that rely heavily on these visual effects render relatively quickly.
Redshift rendering technology employs the computer's GPU to generate high-end production renderings of large or complicated 3D models. For this reason, Redshift relies on certain hardware requirements to work correctly and may not be available for all users; see vectorworks.net/sysreq for Redshift by Maxon's system requirements. Computers that do not support Redshift default to a Realistic type instead. For Vectorworks Service Select members, Redshift by Maxon style renderings can be processed on Vectorworks Cloud Services.
Realistic
The Realistic rendering type produces a high-quality rendering. It processes some textures, including grass, shadow catcher, cloth, some metallics, and bump displacement and parallax, that are not currently supported in Redshift. Realistic also uses some lighting types and effects, including area and line lights, caustics, and separate backgrounds for reflections, that are not currently used in the Redshift rendering type. Use Realistic rendering for these kinds of effects.
Renderings that do not rely heavily on ray tracing to create lighting effects are often processed faster in Realistic.
For the best results, match the rendering type and settings to the scene and visual effects.
The Realistic render type (top) and Redshift render type (bottom) both provide high-quality renderings of this corporate reception area, but they interpret light, reflections, and textures differently
