The issue is fixed in 0.55!

Hello everyone!
We release CentiLeo 0.55 for 3ds Max with new powerfull displacement mapping engine too!
As said in C4D 055 thread there were many R&D tasks that should be solved to make it working normally.
Our Displacement mapping tech is based on pre-tesselation of geometry before rendering. But it's fast and has good memory economy.
This pre-tesselation approach helps to use arbitrarty shading networks now. And it will allow to extend it to vector displacement mapping in the future.
Currently CentiLeo displacement mapped objects are tesselated very-very quickly and render very fast. Faster than competitor pre-tesselation methods. Potentially hundreds million unique triangles can be handled very efficiently if needed for very high resolution.

See this changelog to get the idea how new feature works. We now turn attention to mesh lights and many new shader nodes.

Please, test it and share your opinion!
Best regards,
Kirgman

Download link: http://centileo.com/download/

Change Log: cntlmax 0.553 alpha (2018 December 28)
[cntlmax] Added 3ds max 2019 support.
[cntlmax] Fixed crash bugs for animation rendering of objects with Greeble modifier.

Change Log: cntlmax 0.552 alpha (2018 June 16)
[core] Improved displacement precision in pixel adaptive mode (subtle waves in animation are removed).

Change Log: cntlmax 0.551 alpha (2018 June 12)
[core] Displacement mapping functionality based on explicit geometry pre-tesselation with very efficient memory usage, fast tesselation and fast rendering.
E.g. with GTX 1070-1080 Ti it’s possible to generate and render 1-2 billion unique micropolygons (and more with instancing) – of course if you have at least 32GB of usual RAM.
[core] Displacement mapping supports the whole shader network including current and future procedural shaders/texture mappings except of falloff and other view dependent things.
[core] Displacement mapping can be combined without any issues with deformation motion blur (applied to base geometry, not to displacement height params).
[core] Displacement mapping parameters are controlled through menu of CentiLeo Material that is applied to geometry object.
[core] CentiLeo IPR mode doesn’t retesselate and displace the objects automatically while moving the camera and/or objects. We made it manual, so the user should click the button “Tess” in IPR window to retesselate and displace all objects of the scene with new parameters or click button “Tesselate” in material menu to retesselate only those objects where material is applied.
[core] Option of Autobump mapping as a supplemental tool for Displacement.
[core] Support for 16/32 bit bitmaps for Displacement.
[core] Added rotation and filter radius params to CentiLeo Bitmap.
[core] Added more settings to CentiLeo Noise shader.
[core] Minimum required GPU memory is bumped to 1280MB. This minimum memory is necessary for CentiLeo to operate. Sometimes a 2GB GPU in an overloaded system may have less available memory after memory reductions by OS and 3D app.
[core] Fixed various rare visual bugs, e.g. a bug that made visible artifacts at low FOV.
[drawbacks] Our main work on Displacement mapping still has some drawbacks:
- no yet support for Vector Displacement Mapping (only scalar one);
- divorced surface when the vertex has several different normals (e.g. a corner of a cube);
- it doesn’t like very much when base geometry already has too dense polygon tesselation that should be displaced (there is some more memory overhead);
- no yet Dicing Camera parameter;
These issues will be solved after a series of other feature releases.

Important note
We are currently using JUCE library (https://juce.com/) for IPR GUI under Personal license (which is free) for initial testing purpose. In IPR window it will show in the right bottom corner a splash screen for the first start and it dissapears in few sec. It may also connect to Google Analytics to collect end-user stats. Juce guys claim this is nothing bad but stats collection so they know who is using them. However, the plugin works perfectly without any Internet connection.
If everything works well on main technical side then we will buy the full license of JUCE and get rid of these small issues.

GPU Drivers
Please, install modern NVIDIA display drivers. E.g. at least 372.70 or one of the newest.

Adjust GPU Rendering Low-priority settings
Can be found in CentiLeo Renderer Settings -> Hardware Settings.
Low-priority flags are ON by default in IPR mode for ALL GPUs. For fluent work in IPR mode it’s HIGHLY RECOMMENDED to keep enabled “low-priority” setting for DISPLAY GPU and switch if OFF for other render GPUs which are not connected to the monitor. Low-priority option is useful for display GPU because it is used to display the elements and models of 3D Viewport and OS.
If you have many GPUs in one computer then Display GPU can be excluded from IPR render to have less competition between Viewport and CentiLeo for Display GPU, this can improve the system feedback overall.

Displaced version is slower than without it just because it has more polygons. More polygons for same scene produce slightly slower rendering. But if you model everything with same polycounts the will be same situation

Hello everyone!
We can finally release an update CentiLeo 0.55 for Cinema 4D with new displacement mapping engine. There work was so long because there was a lot of R&D and new algorithms were created to make DM efficient.
We have opted to make DM based on geometry pre-tesselation because we want it to support arbitrary shader networks as input and to make vector displacements too. Both these things are impossible without pre-tesselation. And with this fact many problems may happen like huge poly-counts, screen adaptivity artifacts, not so fast tesselations and renderings. However, we have solved many of these. Btw, there are still some drawbacks and vector displacements are not yet added, but we will fix that at later stage.
See this changelog to get the idea how new feature works. We now turn attention to mesh lights and many new shader nodes.

Please, test it and share your opinion!
Best regards,
Kirgman

Download link (site registration required): http://centileo.com/forum/forum18/148-download-link-centileo-for-cinema-4d-v0550-alpha

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.552 alpha (2018 June 16)
[core] Improved displacement precision in pixel adaptive mode (subtle waves in animation are removed).

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.551 alpha (2018 June 12)
[core] Added overall displace scale and waterlevel parameters.
[cntlc4d] Fixed wrong texture rotation displayed in the viewport.
[cntlc4d] Fixed GPU priority toggling in IPR.
[cntlc4d] Focus distance data from CentiLeo camera tag is automatically moved to corresponding field of the camera object.

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.550 alpha (2018 June 7)
[core] Displacement mapping functionality based on explicit geometry pre-tesselation with very efficient memory usage, fast tesselation and fast rendering.
E.g. with GTX 1070-1080 Ti it’s possible to generate and render 1-2 billion unique micropolygons (and more with instancing) – of course if you have at least 32GB of usual RAM.
[core] Displacement mapping supports the whole shader network including current and future procedural shaders/texture mappings except of falloff and other view dependent things.
[core] Displacement mapping can be combined without any issues with deformation motion blur (applied to base geometry, not to displacement height params).
[core] Displacement mapping parameters are controlled through menu of CentiLeo Material that is applied to geometry object.
[core] CentiLeo IPR mode doesn’t retesselate and displace the objects automatically while moving the camera and/or objects. We made it manual, so the user should click the button “Tess” in IPR window to retesselate and displace all objects of the scene with new parameters or click button “Tesselate” in material menu to retesselate only those objects where material is applied.
[core] Displacement Alpha map is used as the mask of displacement values of the current material which can be useful when several materials are stacked as layers in Cinema 4D.
[core] Option of Autobump mapping as a supplemental tool for Displacement.
[core] Added support of 16/32 bit bitmaps for Displacement.
[core] Added rotation and filter radius params to CentiLeo Bitmap.
[core] Added more settings to CentiLeo Noise shader.
[core] Minimum required GPU memory is bumped to 1280MB. This minimum memory is necessary for CentiLeo to operate. Sometimes a 2GB GPU in an overloaded system may have less available memory after memory reductions by OS and 3D app.
[cntlc4d] CentiLeo camera Depth of Field now listens for native C4D camera focus distance property with proper updates when changed from C4D Editor or CentiLeo IPR.
[cntlc4d] Fixed various rare visual bugs, e.g. a bug that made visible artifacts at low FOV.
[drawbacks] Our main work on Displacement mapping still has some drawbacks:
- no yet support for Vector Displacement Mapping (only scalar one);
- divorced surface when the vertex has several different normals (e.g. a corner of a cube);
- it doesn’t like very much when base geometry already has too dense polygon tesselation that should be displaced (there is some more memory overhead);
- no yet Dicing Camera parameter;
These issues will be solved after a series of other feature releases.

Known issues to be solved
- May not initialize if AMD GPU is in your computer together with NVIDIA GPU.
- Very limited scene converter tool from Cinema 4D native materials (only diffuse color and texture are converted and translated if assigned to the object)
- May not support non-latin texture paths.

Important note
We are currently using JUCE library (https://juce.com/) for IPR GUI under Personal license (which is free) for initial testing purpose. In IPR window it will show in the right bottom corner a splash screen for the first start and it dissapears in few sec. It may also connect to Google Analytics to collect end-user stats. Juce guys claim this is nothing bad but stats collection so they know who is using them. However, the plugin works perfectly without any Internet connection.
If everything works well on main technical side then we will buy the full license of JUCE and get rid of these small issues.

Hi Egor! Welcome on our forum! You are right, we need to update the site content better.
But there was no stop in development because this time we digged too deep in displacement tech internal things. There will be a new release 0.55 in few days. When few other important releases will be done we will be more active on the web.

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p.s.: can't get here on site without VPN....

The problem is that our website is blocked as a consequence of Russia blocking the Telegram servers. However we did nothing wrong. Seems that we need to move from DigitalOcean to somewhere else.

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Daniel Westlund wrote: Thanks! And looking forward to your next release! //Daniel

Yesterday I have won a battle for rendering speed of compressed displacement. The approach was based on pre-tesselation like Arnold, Redshift (not like Octane) because we need to support any kind of combinations of shaders and uv. It was all good, but after all adaptive polygon reductions the poly counts for high quality were still pretty high. And then all of this data was compressed very much. However, render speed dropped 30-50% compared to non-compression. For some weeks there were many attempts to fix that and it's fixed now! No speed lost Now it tesselates quickly, memory is very efficient and renders fast. Now need to fix small things, and this can be done much quicker.

I have detected the issue. And strange thing it goes away when reduce Diffuse roughness or change Reflection roughness, IOR. Will dig, there is something with material evaluation.

Hi Daniel, thanks for bugreport. I will download and see what is going on there.

Btw, I am still fighting with displacement mapping. There was a need to imrpove render times after memory optimisation. Solving it is almost ready. Hope that problems go away.

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Alex Comtur wrote: How to make light1 transparent to light0? How do I turn off shadows? (Как сделать взаимную прозрачность источников света и отключать тени?) Прошу прощения - перепутал софт

Hi Alex! This currently not supported, I have switched it off some day due to some other problems and lighting inconsistency because of this (don't remember exact problem).
Will try to return this feature for next 0.56 lighting release. Right now working hard on displacement mapping
Btw, your english is good enough. And russian would be nice in VK group

I have added to TODO list: object visibility properties, ray switch (material/shader), improve shadow catcher with more props.

I hope to do next release in a week, but we will see how things work. Right now there is a need to reduce huge counts of tesselated micropolygons. Other things are in a good shape now.
Many additional good ideas related to displacement (better perfomance/memory/flexibility) have been accumulated and I think there will be another alpha release for displacement mapping (closer to 0.7)

Evgeniy, the example from Cinema that you show presents a little bit different from what I understand as shadow catcher. In your example there are different material properties for reflection rays, camera rays and shadow casts. E.g. reflection rays from sphere see the checker that is not seen from camera directly).
I think it's a little bit different functionality from shadow catcher. Usually what you have shown is called RaySwitch material (e.g. in Corona) where you assign different materials for Camera, Reflection, Diffuse, Refraction, etc. rays. And there are also some features that implement exclusion of some 3D objects from reflections or camera or shadow casts from other objects. With all this flexibility and based on physical light transport under some constraints you may implement many interesting solutions. And it's possible to add these things to CentiLeo in the future.
What I understand as shadow catcher is a different thing a little bit. It is a tool to add 3D computer graphics objects inside a photo. And the essential thing is to draw shadows casted by CG objects onto the ground in the photo. You usually make a plane (or some more complex object) and place objects on top of it, enable shadow catcher and there you get shadows without additional illumination on the photo. Howefer, I think we can make the option to light source to add lighting on the photo (to the region with shadow catcher material). And it's also possible to make shadow catcher for alpha-channel only: on beauty it renders without background color on the plane but in alpha channel it still draws the shadows. What do you think about that?

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Daniel Westlund wrote: Thanks and sorry for my late response. I still think it would be a good Idea to be able to set the color of the shadow catcher by hand and not always relate to the background image. //Daniel

just need to understand how this functionality should work and then we can probably do it

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Oliver Bennett wrote: Huge fan of Centileo in Cinema 4D, I can't wait to see what comes next!

Hi Oliver! And welcome to CentiLeo!
There was a lot of R&D done since the begin of the year. Very soon there will be 3 new releases one after another. E.g. the next one will get displacement mapping.

Hi Daniel, here is an example scene attached. Pictures:
1.png - plane, teapot and 2 lights, black background (almost black)
2.png - shadow catcher checked for plane material (diffuse property takes background color)
3.png - background grey just to show that there are shadows there (and plane recieves the shadows). Same would be with image background
4.png - Alpha channel enabled
5.png - changed shadow intensity by light source (inside shadow catcher materials). Those shadow intensities are relative to each other. The higher the "shadow catcher" value of the light source the stronger the shadow.
6.png - Alpha channel displayed

I think we need more flexible AOV funtionality to collect various portions of image and various GI/reflection/refraction subimages.

Hi Daniel! Here shadow catcher works as designed in all images.
1. There is a green (green?) diffuse material + some reflection and you see the GI reflected from it and visible by camera.
2. When you turn on shadow catcher then it replaces the diffuse color with the color of environment map for the current context (i.e. for primary visibility this is env map for camera, for reflected rays it is env map for reflection, etc.) In your example the environment map is black, that's why diffuse color of shadow catcher material is black too.
3. And when you turn off reflections then the ground plane become black entirelly: no reflections and black diffuse (because black bacground).

You may get the picture of shadows if you make the environment map not black (green, white or anything you like) and enable Alpha channel in AOVs rollout. If you enable it you will be able to get Beauty and Alpha without background picture but with all that shadow casts (with white alpha for shadows and black alpha for lit regions).

Returning to picture 1 - you want' to collect the picture of green GI? But it's green because the ground diffuse is green (and light is white) - right? If we want the shadow catcher picture to be green too, then need to enable it and make green background but switch if off from visibility in AOVs rollout (somewhere in the top of menu - dont' remember correctly, I am writting from memory).
If you still have problem with it I will upload a scene tomorrow with settings

As for SSS - then it needs currently under development displacement and some other polishing, eg. SSS sets where we could assing some numbers to objects or materials and compute shared SSS influence for objects/materials with same SSS set number.
Current new version development is going very well, but it required to make things that were planned for more distant future, that's why it's goibg longer then we want.

Let me check the focus distance issue and fix. The next version is always soon, but still fixing few new issues.

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Daniel Westlund wrote: Thanks. Also the shadowcatcher only works when the background override is on, set to higher than 0. Otherwise I cant get an alpha channel. Also it would be great if the secondary light of the matte object was optionaly reflected. //Daniel

Hi Daniel, I will double-check it again for zero values. Maybe it considers that with values 0.00001 the background override is working but it's black as with zero (almost black).
You can switch off the secondary illumination of shadow catcher object if you switch on the shadow catcher checkbox and swicth off reflections. This way it will show just the background and shadows, but will ignore reflections (that are on by default).

I will fix that soon!

Hi Daniel,
I understand your feelings
And I also respect Blender very very much. However, we should make few other things before that:
1) We need to reach 0.6 release (a very improtant one with hard features in todo list).
2) Then need to make 0.7 with much simpler but usefull features.
3) And promote all of this with galleries, video lessons and etc.
4) We also need Maya from the world of Autodesk )
And only after that the Blender plugin can be done. Making a plugin code is not a big problem, but making it friendly with Blender licensing (free open source) is some thing that need to be done without forcing the end user to suffer with potential issues related to license.