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ssjenforcer wrote: is there a way to reduce the max iteration in the IPR to try to help speed up animation previews?

In the main renderer settings of CentiLeo, single user control

ssjenforcer, it works progressively. The user first opens the IPR and see how the noise goes, then adjust the max iteration count to the number that gives better speed for desired noise based on few experiments on a given scene with a given lighting.
Default 32 iterations is an example, of course very often a smaller number of iterations is enough.
When I will recover the feature of adaptive rendering based on per pixel noise then these 32 iterations will finish very quickly if for example 8 iterations are already enough. It will look much faster for the scenes where the most part of image has much less noise that the other part.

In case you use node material editor there is an Emission material node that can be used to plug into Output node or it can be combined with Material using MixMaterial.
Otherwise you can use simple not-node based materials, this way an Emission channel is available inside the Standard CentiLeo Material together with Reflection, Diffuse, Alpha and other channels.

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ssjenforcer wrote: Ok, I had disabled the check on my cloner objects but neglected to also uncheck my lights that were childs of the cloner, and so they were still emitting light in the scene and casting that shadow. Turning all their shadow weights to 0 fixes everything.

Basically in the case for this scene it can be faster to make these colored light souces on the Christmass tree with sphere objects and apply an Emission material on them with "imtportance sample" off. The render may become faster if these lights produce local lighting, not global.

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ssjenforcer wrote: It was just confusing me that the beauty showed a certain shadow and the alpha showed extra shadows. Is there any reason that the two modes would show different shadows, when having and not having shadow catcher enabled? Is there a way to make them show the same shadows in both modes, particularly when viewing IPR?

They should be the same on the shadow catcher plane. But they may look different based on the color conditions, the alpha channel is black and white and it may show the shadow masks more clearly on a black background.

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ssjenforcer wrote: Or is the simplest way to remember to change my shadow weights for every light source?

Basically only few types of light sources can contribute to the shadow strength that is casted to the shadow catcher object:
1) Sky + HDRI using CentiLeo environment tag, it has shadow weight.
2) Directional (Infinite) regular light with CentiLeo light tag, it has has shadow weight.
3) Regular light of Omni type with CentiLeo light tag, it has has shadow weight.
Other types of light sources (area, spot) don't produce shadows on the shadow catcher plane. If you want to exclude some lights from producing the shadows then just make shadow weight equal to zero. Or make it a smaller number to make this shadow weaker compared to others. This feature is nice itself and has potential to future improvement.

This video file sequence will be supported in the future. At this moment only static images are supported as bitmap.

That remaining shadow in front of the tree is probably casted using the light source that is not switched off. The bottom line status bar says there are 8 light sources in the scene.
How did you implemented the colored light sources on the tree?
1) If they are regular cinema omni lights with centileo light tags then by default they will cast shadows on the shadow catcher. In this case you can set shadow catcher matte weight to zero for all such lights.
2) If you have implemented the colored light sources on the tree with the spheres and emission material then they will not produce the shadows for the shadow catcher object and will not affect it. This is a preffered way for render speed for this scene if you don't enable imprortance sampling for such emission materials because their lighting is local.
If you want the shadow catcher object to receive the shadow only from the one light source or Sky HDRI then only this object (using CentiLeo light tag or environment tag) should have shadow catcher / matte weight equal to 1. And all other unwanted light sources should have shadow catcher / matte weight equal to zero.

Hi Vlad! Welcome to CentiLeo! Here we prefer speaking English. Thank you for the question! In the future we will certainly translate CentiLeo to Russian language, the challenging part will be to translate the documentation, there will be lot's of work.

Enable Transmission channel for glass, it has IOR for refraction. Alpha channel has no refraction IOR and has no roughness.

Have a look at this post: https://centileo.com/forum/messages/forum19/message1567/83-centileo-for-cinema-4d-044-available#mess...
And this https://centileo.com/forum/messages/forum19/message1590/83-centileo-for-cinema-4d-044-available#mess...
In short, there can be Filter settings in PV turned on/off. There can be "Send raw AOVs to Picture Viewer" enabled in AOVs tab of CentiLeo render settings.
Just check these options

Do you animate the brightness? How many light sources are there in the scene? Btw, it's not easy to detect the issue without the scene itself.

Hi Ivan.Huang, and welcome here! I know automatic material converter is surely very much needed for us. We will start working on it soon, I hope it will be released in 0.67 release and it will include standard C4D materials, Octane and Redshift to convert from.

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ds wrote: Trying with 4 samples and no de-noising and I notice there's a lot of variation in the lighting where I wouldn't expect from frame to frame. I have importance sampling turned on on the emissive light material, could that be doing it?

Not sure what's wrong there. Do you mean variation as "more noise" without denoiser? That would need more iterations to resolve. Improtance sample On/Off for emissive light has slight difference between them. To get less or no diffrerence between these two options the "light shift" parameter should be zero, it's placed under material "bump" section.

You may test what settings really work for example by testing the animation in lowres just to get quick renders, then apply denoiser. Denoisers behave this way on extreme low sample counts.

It looks like you use denoiser and low sample (iterations) count. That's why it flickers. CentiLeo doesn't use biased techniques inside.

Actually only experiments will help to find the right settings here. On CentiLeo side we will implement a lot of AOVs (extra images), mask images, some funtionality to combine them in the output. It's all possible because we have a very good architecture to support the render and output of really many images at once.

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ds wrote: Ram usage not that bad, when I was rendering before it would immediately crash with the memory error, but now it's fine.

Have you seen these crashes in Cinema+CentiLeo? 17k or 170k polygons is really nothing, so there can be some bug or anything else, maybe a lot of polygons. I would like to investigate there if you can send me your scene that crashes.

Hi S1512, thank you very much for kind word! Welcome here! We work with great enthusiasm! A lot of very important features are on the roadmap. Volumetrics are there too, but they will appear later than other important things

Solution:
This article from Manual describes the way to enable Cinema 4D textures from Asset Browser for CentiLeo:
https://centileo.com/docs/index.php?COURSE_ID=3&LESSON_ID=57&LESSON_PATH=17.57

It looks like you are doing a very good AI progress! Actually I can't believe such cools things are coming to life! Hope to test them at some point.
Blender is a good path, but I would also recommend not to forget Cinema 4D, first of all because it's also very cool and progresses nicelly, and also because CentiLeo is there

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ds wrote: This issue was fixed by lowering the poly count on the models I imported from zbrush.

How many polygons in total? Maybe your loader adds polygons each frame without releasing memory for ther previous frame? If that's some kind of Alembic it looks strange. What is your RAM size and what's the memory consumption in the Windows task manager during the PV render?

Looking forward to see you animations!

Glad, you fixed this! Btw there are also options in C4D file saving something like "Straight Alpha", "Pre-multiplied Alpha".
Also in CentiLeo render options (in AOVs tab) there is "Transparent Background" option that also kills the reflection of background on reflections as far as I remember