How much of a Redshift scene actually transfers?

All of it, within a defined scope. 158 Redshift classes were scanned on the 3ds Max side — 24 materials, 123 texmaps, 6 lights, 3 modifiers, 1 atmospheric and the renderer. 152 of the 152 in-scope classes transfer, 147 of them with no approximation at all. Six are out of scope for reasons that cannot be worked around: RS OSL Material and RS OSL Map contain arbitrary OSL code, RS Shave depends on Shave & Haircut hair geometry, and the rest have no meaningful 3ds Max source.

Which Redshift materials are supported?

Every one except RS OSL Material. RS Standard Material transfers its full channel set — base, reflection with anisotropy, refraction with thin-walled and Abbe dispersion, subsurface, sheen, thin film, coat, emission, opacity, plus bump, coat bump and displacement. Also RS OpenPBR Material, RS Incandescent, RS SSS, RS Material Blender, RS Car Paint, RS Skin, RS Toon, RS Matte/Shadow Catcher, RS Architectural, RS Material legacy, RS Sprite, RS Ray Switch, RS Hair and the volume shaders.

Do Redshift lights and the Sun & Sky transfer?

Yes, all six Redshift light types. RS Physical Light covers Area, Point, Spot and Infinite with colour mode, temperature, exposure, decay, area shape and spread. RS Dome Light carries its HDRI, RS IES Light carries its .ies profile, and RS Portal Light carries height, multiplier, tint, transparency and environment map. Sun and Sun & Sky transfer 1:1 including sky, moon and stars — and if your scene already has a Sun & Sky object, it is completed rather than duplicated, which would otherwise double your lighting.

Are Redshift render settings transferred?

Yes. Sampling, sample overrides, trace depths, GI with irradiance cache and irradiance point cloud, caustics, motion blur, denoising and global displacement all land on a Redshift VideoPost, and the render engine is pre-selected — so F9 renders in Redshift straight after import with no setup. Per-camera post effects come across too: bloom, flare, streak, LUT, colour controls, optical settings and the backplate, block by block.

New in v1.3.0

Redshift for 3ds Max → Redshift for Cinema 4D — Node for Node

Q: What does not transfer?

A short and deliberate list. AOVs are out of scope for now. .rs proxy files are not exported — the mesh path is kept instead. VDB volume grids are not carried, so RS Volume and RS Standard Volume arrive with their ramps and settings but no grid. Vertex colours are not transferred, because the 3ds Max OBJ exporter does not write them. Hair and fur geometry does not come across. And global Redshift post effects are unreachable from MaxScript, so post effects transfer per camera only. Every one of these is logged during conversion rather than silently dropped.

Q: Can I send a V-Ray or Corona scene to Redshift instead?

Yes, and that is a separate pipeline worth knowing about. Set the renderer dropdown to Redshift and a V-Ray or Corona scene rebuilds as native Redshift nodes — VRayMtl and CoronaPhysicalMtl become RS Standard Material, lights become RS Lights, VRaySun and CoronaSun become RS Sun & Sky, and proxies are baked into real geometry. See the cross-renderer guide for what maps and what does not.

12 min readUpdated July 30, 2026

Move every RS Standard Material, every texmap, every RS light and your whole render configuration from 3ds Max into Cinema 4D — rebuilt as a native Redshift node graph, not an approximation of one.

24 material types123 texmaps152 / 152 in-scope classesNo extra renderer licence

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Redshift for Cinema 4D vs Redshift for 3ds Max

Same engine. Same RS Standard Material. Same node names. Different host.

The good news

Redshift is one renderer with several hosts, all maintained by Maxon. The shading model is identical: an RS Standard Material in 3ds Max and an RS Standard Material in Cinema 4D expose the same ports, in some cases under literally the same property names. A texmap graph that renders one way in Max renders the same way in C4D given the same values. That parity is the entire reason a genuine node-for-node transfer is possible instead of a best guess.

There is a second piece of good news that is easy to miss: Redshift already ships with Cinema 4D. Every C4D licence since 2023 includes it. So unlike the Corona and V-Ray targets, which need Corona for C4D or V-Ray for C4D installed to produce native materials, the Redshift target needs nothing you do not already own.

The catch

Maxon does not ship a scene interchange tool between the two hosts. The .max format is proprietary to Autodesk and can only be read by 3ds Max itself, so Redshift for Cinema 4D has no way to open a .max file directly — even though it is the very same renderer at the other end.

FBX strips every RS material

FBX has no concept of a Redshift node graph. Every RS Standard Material becomes an empty Standard material, every RS Texture connection disappears, and the graph is gone. You are left with grey geometry and an empty material manager. Side-by-side breakdown: MAX2C4D vs FBX comparison.

Requires Cinema 4D 2024.4 or newer

The importer builds Redshift graphs declaratively against the RS node space, which became reliable in Cinema 4D 2024.4. Below that version the Redshift entry simply does not appear in the renderer dropdown, and the scene converts through Corona, V-Ray or Standard instead.

Redshift Material Types

24 Redshift material classes exist on the 3ds Max side. All of them transfer except RS OSL Material, which holds arbitrary OSL source code and therefore has nothing to map to. RS Standard Material — the one that carries most archviz scenes — transfers roughly 35 channels plus its maps, bump, coat bump and displacement.

RS Standard Material

The full channel set — base, reflection with anisotropy, refraction with thin-walled and Abbe, subsurface, sheen, thin film, coat, emission, opacity

RS OpenPBR Material

Redshift 2026’s newer shading model, transferred like for like

RS Incandescent

Emissive surfaces with colour, alpha, intensity and temperature

RS SSS

Subsurface scattering with scatter radius scaled to your scene units

RS Material Blender

Base plus layers with their masks and weights

RS Car Paint

Flake, coat and base layers

RS Skin

Shallow, mid and deep scatter with both reflection lobes

RS Toon Material

Base, roughness, IOR, opacity and tone ramps

RS Matte / Shadow Catcher

Matte surfaces and shadow catchers

RS Architectural

The legacy architectural shader — still common in older archviz scenes

RS Material (legacy)

Older Redshift scenes convert without special handling

RS Sprite

Opacity cut-outs for vegetation — file, repeats and sub-material

RS Ray Switch Material

Per-ray-type material switching

RS Hair / Principled Hair

Hair shading (the hair geometry itself is not transferred)

123 Texmaps, Recursively Mapped

The graph is preserved, not collapsed. Every nested texmap, every colour correction, every maths node between your bitmap and your material arrives with its connections intact. Of the 123 Redshift texmaps in 3ds Max, 121 map one-to-one; the two exceptions are RS OSL Map (arbitrary code) and RS Shave (Shave & Haircut geometry).

Bitmaps, bump & displacement

RS Texture — tiling, offset, rotation, colour space, wrap/mirror
RS Normal Map → tangent-space bump with UV channel
RS Bump Map — height or tangent input, flip Y
RS Bump Blender — base plus three weighted layers, recursive
RS Displacement — scale, ranges, encoding and space
RS Bitmap — the older Redshift bitmap in legacy scenes

Projection & utility

RS TriPlanar
RS UV Projection / UV Context Projection
RS Round Corners
RS MatCap
RS State / Surface Tangent
RS Unit Conversion
RS IOR to Metal Tints
RS Ray Switch

Procedural & environment

RS AO
RS Fresnel
RS Curvature
RS Maxon Noise
RS Distance
RS Wireframe
RS Flakes
RS Brick / Tiles / Pavement / Scratches
RS Physical Sky

Colour, maths & user data

RS Color Correct — gamma, contrast, hue, saturation, level
15 colour nodes — mix, invert, splitter, maker, HSV, gain, bias
32 scalar maths nodes
29 vector maths nodes
RS Color / Scalar / Integer / Vector User Data

Verified, not assumed

The graph builder was checked against a generated 3ds Max scene containing 127 Redshift classes, one per material. All 127 came through the export, 126 produced exactly the expected Redshift node in Cinema 4D with zero warnings, and the document rendered in Redshift without a crash. The 127th case — a colour correct with nothing plugged into it — is skipped on purpose.

Redshift Lights, Sun & Sky

All six Redshift light types transfer, with their intensity units, colour mode, temperature and decay preserved. Because the light enums match on both sides, most of this is a direct copy rather than a conversion.

RS Physical Light

Area, Point, Spot and Infinite — colour mode, temperature, exposure, decay, area shape and size, spread, visibility flags

RS Dome Light

HDRI environment with multiplier and rotation

RS IES Light

.ies profile collected and relinked with its full parameter block

RS Portal Light

Height, multiplier, tint, transparency and environment map

RS Sun

Sun-only lighting with no parasitic sky added

RS Sun & Sky

Sun, sky, moon and stars 1:1 — an existing Sun & Sky is completed, never duplicated

3ds Max’s own lights now transfer too

Before v1.3.0, 3ds Max's native lights — spot, omni, directional and photometric — were collected by no export path at all. A scene lit with them arrived in Cinema 4D with those lights simply missing, and nothing in the log said so. They now come through on every target: omni becomes a Point light, spots become Spot, directional becomes Infinite, and photometric lights carry their intensity in candelas plus their IES profile where they have one. Worth knowing: 3ds Max's inverse (1/d) decay has no exact Redshift equivalent and is approximated, and Max's far attenuation is not transferred because Redshift ties that to intensity — both are named in the log rather than passed over in silence.

Render Settings & Camera Post Effects

Your render configuration lands on a Redshift VideoPost with the render engine already selected, so pressing F9 straight after import renders in Redshift with no setup step.

Unified sampling, per-type sample overrides and noise threshold
Trace depths — reflection, refraction and combined
GI with irradiance cache and irradiance point cloud
Caustics, motion blur and denoising
Global displacement, plus per-object tessellation via the RS Object tag
Volumetric fog through the RS Environment object

Per-camera post effects

The camera tag carries camera type, fisheye, cylindrical and stereo settings, and the whole post-effects stack transfers block by block — bloom, flare, streak, LUT, colour controls, optical settings and the backplate. Each block keeps its own override and enabled state, so a camera that had bloom switched off in Max arrives with bloom switched off in Cinema 4D.

Coming from V-Ray or Corona instead?

Redshift is not only a destination for Redshift scenes. Set the renderer dropdown to Redshift and a V-Ray or Corona scene is rebuilt as a native Redshift node graph — which means you can change renderer at the same time as you change application, in one pass.

VRayMtl and CoronaPhysicalMtl become RS Standard Material, lights become RS Lights, VRaySun and CoronaSun become RS Sun & Sky, HDRI environments become an RS Dome Light, and V-Ray or Corona proxies are baked into real geometry because Redshift cannot read .vrmesh or .cgeo. Some source-specific effects have no Redshift target and are logged rather than guessed.

Read the V-Ray & Corona → Redshift guide

What Does Not Transfer

A short list, and a deliberate one. Everything here is written to the conversion log by name, so you always know what needs attention rather than discovering it at render time.

AOVs

Out of scope for now — render elements are not carried across

.rs proxy files

Not exported; the mesh path is preserved instead

VDB volume grids

RS Volume and RS Standard Volume arrive with ramps and settings, without the grid

OSL

RS OSL Material and RS OSL Map hold arbitrary code with nothing to map to

Hair & fur geometry

Hair shaders transfer; the strands themselves do not

Vertex colours

3ds Max’s OBJ exporter does not write them, so the slot is left empty and logged

Global post effects

Unreachable from MaxScript — post effects transfer per camera only

RS Camera Map picker

The referenced camera is an internal id, so the camera must be re-picked once

This is the initial Redshift release

Redshift is the newest of the three targets, and a first release always leaves a few edge cases to iron out. If a scene converts wrong, email contact@max2c4d.com with the log folder written next to your exported scene and a short description of what you expected instead. Those two together are usually enough to reproduce the problem and fix it in the next update.

Redshift Conversion FAQ

Yes — same engine, same shading model, same node names, different host. RS Standard Material, RS Texture, RS Bump Map and the rest exist on both sides with matching parameters. That parity is what makes a genuine 1:1 transfer possible rather than an approximation. The difference is the host: the .max format is proprietary to Autodesk, so Redshift for Cinema 4D cannot open a .max file on its own.

No. Redshift has shipped with every Cinema 4D licence since 2023, so there is nothing extra to install or pay for on the C4D side. This is the one target of the three that never needs a second renderer licence. The only requirement is Cinema 4D 2024.4 or newer — that is where the Redshift node space the importer builds against became reliable, and below it the Redshift option is hidden in the import dialog.

Keep every Redshift material. Every node. Every light.

24 material types. 123 texmaps. 6 light types. And no second renderer licence to buy.

152

classes covered

123

texmaps

clicks

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