In short the download link for Cinema 4D plugin is here (registration required to access it)
User manual download:
We init the public adventure of CentiLeo renderer for Cinema 4D R16 and R17!
This video shows interactive CentiLeo integrated into Cinema 4D for a scene with 8.5 million primary polygons and 15 million displaced. Single GTX 970 (3.5 GB total) is used for this video process
System requirements
- OS Windows 7 or higher
- NVIDIA GPUs with at least 2 GB of VRAM and compute capability of 2 or higher.
- GPUs with at least 3 GBs are recommended.
- Latest GPU drivers are recommended.
- Main RAM with at least 4 GB (8 or 16GB are recommended).
- Cinema 4D R16-R17
Features of CentiLeo for Cinema 4D plugin
Geometry
1) Out-of-core geometry meshes (even hundreds millions polygons) with GPU acceleration and without GPU memory limits.
2) Adaptive on-the-fly displacement mapping with pixel precision.
3) Fast support of dynamic meshes at scene load time and during modeling with opened CentiLeo IPR window.
4) Native Cinema 4D instancing accounting on-the-fly.
Light transport (GI) solver
1) Noise-driven path tracer which accelerates rendering noisier image parts when other parts are already clean.
2) Metropolis lighting solver with firefly killer option which can improve over the path tracer for some complex lighting situations, however it is not always better than the path tracer.
Textures
1) Out-of-core and out-of-CPU RAM textures with GPU acceleration. This means that sometimes the textures may not fit even CPU memory and this case is handled.
2) Up to 16K x 16K texture image files.
3) Up to 100K textures in the scene.
4) Texture file reader is currently based on FreeImage library (). All inherited limitations like the lack of certain formats will be resolved soon.
Materials and Shaders
1) CentiLeo Standard material (cntlStdMat) with 2 reflection lobes (also anisotropic), 3 SSS layers, diffuse layer and transmission layer, 2 bump map slots (global and reflection only). 30 properties overall, shaders can be applied to everything.
2) CentiLeo Multi Material (cntlMultiMat) which can combine up to 10 cntlStdMats.
3) Multi Material has displacement mapping and geometry mask slots.
4) Currently only own CentiLeo shaders are supported:
a. cntlTexture (Bitmap, file with image)
b. cntlNoise (procedural noise)
c. cntlHDRI (used for environmental maps)
d. cntlConst (for arbitrary values)
e. cntlTriplanar (implements triplanar UV projection)
f. cntlFalloff (mixes two shaders based on IOR falloff)
g. cntlColorCorrection (edits the color output of another shader)
h. cntlBlend (mixes two shaders with a shadered blend)
i. cntlBinary (performs binary basic math operation on 2 shaders like add, mul, sub, div, pow, min, max)
j. Substantially more shaders will be added in this list with special priority to Dirt, Carpaint, Gradient, Multi-Texture and more Noise types and 3rd party shaders.
Light sources
1) Basic Area, Directional, Spot and Point (spherical) light types are supported as objects.
2) Options of lights visibility for certain material layers.
3) Option to select the light pass id for certain light source.
4) Environment mapping can be enabled in CentiLeo Renderer settings for different material layers.
AOVs for compositing
1) Support for rendering up to 8 light passes which are rendered in parallel with Beauty image. These can be saved as separate image layers for further manipulation in compositing tools.
Camera
1) Only perspective camera view is currently supported
2) Depth of Field controls with sensor width, focus distance, number of blades and blade angle.
3) Motion blur is yet to be done (after Hair and Fur).
Interactive Preview Render
1) Same scene rendering as production mode.
2) Interactive reaction to camera motion
3) Interactive reaction to geometry mesh edits
4) Interactive reaction to object motion/rotation and etc.
5) Correct recognition of Cinema 4D hierarchical geometry instances and objects on the fly while modeling
6) Interactive reaction to lights/environment/materials/shaders edits.
7) Switch on/off reaction to mesh edits
Switch on/off per frame retesselation if displacement mapping is present
9) Selector of auto-focus point on the screen
Limitations
1) Up to 30 total ray bounces and up to 10 diffuse ray bounces.
2) Up to 16K textures
3) Up to 100K textures
4) Up to 2M instances of meshes in one scene
5) NVIDIA only GPUs with compute capability 2.0 and higher and at least 2 GBs of device memory (however we recommend 3 and more GB of memory).
6) Windows only version of Cinema 4D is currently supported.
Features in TODO list
1) Multi-GPU support
2) Further light transport render math improvement
3) ForestPack/RailClone
4) Multiscatter
5) Full motion-blur
6) Hair and Fur
7) Further displacement mapping improvement
More AOVs (more beauty, info and mask with more customization)
9) Post production Glare, Bloom and Flare, LUTs
10) Many explicit mesh UV sets
11) More procedural UV sets
12) Dirt, special carpaint, gradient, multi-texture, more noise types and other shaders
13) More photography camera options
14) Mesh lights with emission texture
15) Include/Exclude lists for lights and objects
16) IES lights
17) Shadow catcher
18) Procedural Sky system
19) Volumetrics
20) Proxy meshes
21) Support CentiLeo textures display in viewport
22) Support most common Cinema 4D and 3rd party materials, lights and maps as direct translation and conversion to CentiLeo analogues
23) Utility light lister
24) Utility texture cache upfront creation
25) Utility of production rendering for prepared scene outside of Cinema 4D
26) And more features, connections with 3rd party plugins and popular data formats improving the renderer
Known issues to be solved soon:
1) No yet multi-GPU (started working)
2) No yet support for Pascal GPUs (like GTX 1080). All we need is to transit to CUDA 8
3) May not initialize if AMD GPU is in your computer together with NVIDIA GPU.
4) Very limited scene converter tool from other renderers (only diffuse property and textures from standard C4D material)
5) Black material previews when IPR mode is not running
Have fun!
