Engineering Speed to Empower Creation: Nicolas Burtnyk on Building the Future of Rendering

Nicolas Burtnyk has spent the majority of his career focused on a simple idea: creativity thrives when friction disappears. He learned early on that faster tools don’t just save time and money; they change how artists think, experiment, and create. At Maxon, Nic leads the evolution of Redshift – a tool he helped to create and bring to market – with that belief at its core.

Trained as a computer scientist, Nic has always been drawn to the intersection of math, logic, and art, building systems that allow artists to stay in flow rather than waiting on progress bars. Mixing passion with talent, he began his early career at a video game studio alongside his future co-founders Panos Zompolasand and Rob Slater. The idea that would eventually become Redshift started not as a business plan, but as a moment of frustration, when a character artist vented about how long it took to render a simple animation at home, leaving graphics to render overnight, only to wake up to work still in progress. At the same time, GPUs were becoming dramatically more powerful, driven by advances in real-time graphics.

That moment sparked an idea: what if production-quality rendering could be radically faster? What if the same hardware powering video games could be used to accelerate final-frame, photorealistic imagery?

Rendering is the invisible engine behind every photoreal frame, turning a digital scene into a final image. For Hollywood films and AAA game cinematics, it requires massive infrastructure and years, even centuries, of compute time to output results. Before tools like Redshift, rendering cinematic-quality images on consumer-grade desktop computers was simply not feasible. Nic explains, “In order to render all of the frames for a feature-length animated film on a single machine, you would have had to start in the Bronze Age, around the time when the Pyramids of Giza were built in Egypt, to finish it on time.”

For several years, Redshift existed in late nights and weekends alongside full-time jobs, until the team came to the realization that they were truly onto something – and it could no longer remain a side project. “To actually get this to market and be successful, we would have to go all in,” Nic says. The team made the leap, incorporating Redshift in 2012 and committing fully to building a product that challenged long-held assumptions about rendering performance.

From the beginning, Redshift grew through direct relationships with artists. The team embedded themselves in user forums, email threads, and one-on-one conversations, often spending hours each day responding to questions and fixing issues alongside their customers. Artists weren’t talking to support staff – they were talking to the engineers writing the code. This grassroots approach to building the technology is a key ingredient to the success they’d soon achieve. 

By the time Maxon entered the picture, Redshift had grown well beyond its origins as a scrappy engineering-led startup. The technology was proven, adoption was accelerating, and the community was strong – but sustaining that momentum was becoming increasingly difficult. Scaling meant more than writing code. It meant resources, partnerships, infrastructure, and a pace that wasn’t sustainable for a small, founder-driven team working nonstop.

“We knew that we were getting to an inflection point where we needed to scale beyond this startup size. The pace that we were running things personally was not going to be sustainable.” The timing was right to bring in a partner.

Maxon offered something Redshift couldn’t achieve alone: the ability to reach exponentially more artists, faster, while preserving the values that had shaped the product from the start. Joining Maxon meant taking the same core mission – empowering artists through speed, creative freedom, and powerful, high-end performance – and extending it to a global creative community.

For much of its history, Redshift has been tightly associated with high-end visual effects, animation, and motion design – industries where rendering speed and image quality are mission-critical. That same technology is now being extended into new creative and professional domains, most notably architectural visualization and product visualization.

At a technical level, the challenges architects and product designers face are strikingly similar to those in film and VFX: complex scenes, demanding clients, and the need to communicate ideas clearly before anything is built. What’s changed in recent years is the hardware. Modern GPUs now include dedicated ray tracing acceleration, and advances in AI-powered denoising and upscaling have enabled near-cinematic realism in real time. The Archviz solution is supported by Maxon Capsules – an expanding, monthly-updated library of materials, plants, furniture, and environmental elements – designed to accelerate scene building without compromising quality. As the AEC solution evolves, so will the Capsule library, ensuring architects and designers have access to relevant, production-ready assets that keep pace with their workflows.

“There's a ton of overlap in the technology stack used for media and entertainment purposes and that of architectural and product visualization. We know Redshift can bring huge benefits to this market, and we’re all in on that strategy to deliver.”

This shift opens the door to entirely new workflows. Instead of waiting hours for final images, designers can dynamically explore lighting, materials, and design options, making faster, more confident decisions thanks to environments that respond in real time to real-world parameters. For Nic, this is about more than entering a new market. It’s about applying Redshift’s core strengths to help professionals visualize and iterate on ideas, reduce friction, and communicate intent more effectively – regardless of their creative field.

With planned integrations across leading AEC tools, Maxon is making a long-term investment in bringing high-end rendering capabilities to architects, interior designers, and engineers, without requiring them to change how they work.

This is not a single integration or a short-term experiment. Maxon’s AEC expansion strategy is built around a growing pipeline of native integrations across leading CAD and BIM platforms, including Vectorworks (now commercially available), Autodesk Revit® (currently in beta), and Graphisoft Archicad (beta coming later this year), with additional integrations planned through 2027. Rather than forcing architects to adopt new tools, Redshift is designed as a native plugin within the platforms they already rely on – creating a seamless bridge between real-time design previews and cinematic-quality final renders.

“We’re not treating this as a one-off integration. We’re committed to bringing cinematic-quality rendering into architectural workflows, with a roadmap of integrations and features that support how architects actually work.”

Beyond architecture visualization, Maxon sees the future of rendering in the creation of digital twins: accurate, production-ready digital replicas of real-world products. Built on the same technology foundation as Cinema 4D and powered by a streamlined version of Redshift, Maxon’s Digital Twin standalone app allows companies to create precise 3D representations of their products that can be reused across a wide variety of product marketingworkflows.

Digital Twin provides a simplified environment for turning CAD models or 3D assets into accurate digital replicas – an area that generative AI simply cannot touch. “For brands whose identity lives in the details of their products, Digital Twin ensures that every rendering preserves the exact geometry, materials, and visual signature of the real thing, in every iteration and every output.”

As Redshift evolves, the principles that shaped it from the beginning remain firmly in place. Performance is essential because speed defines creative momentum. Flexibility ensures artists and studios can tailor workflows to their needs. Scalability allows the software to grow from a single workstation to the most demanding production environments. Stability builds trust, especially in GPU-driven pipelines. And broad hardware support ensures artists aren’t constrained by platform or device.

Looking ahead, Redshift’s focus is on deeper interactivity, smarter use of hardware acceleration, and continued refinement of workflows that keep artists in flow. AI-enabled features play a supporting role in that evolution. Advances in AI-driven denoising and upscaling, combined with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, allow Redshift to deliver cleaner images at high speeds without sacrificing quality.

For Nic, AI is not about removing the artist from the process; it’s about reducing noise, shortening feedback loops, and helping creative professionals make better decisions faster. “The goal has always been to remove barriers between imagination and execution, at any scale. What drives me to do this work is empowering artists and designers to be the best they can be by giving them powerful tools to express themselves in visual storytelling.”

As Redshift moves into new industries and workflows, that mission remains unchanged: build tools artists and designers can trust, rely on, and grow with, wherever creativity takes them next.