CentiLeo Features for Cinema 4D plugin

This list is not yet complete and is very brief.

Geometry handling

  • Super fast processing for huge amount of geometry, splines and particles
  • Real-time ray tracing with out-of-core data management and streaming with GPU acceleration even when GPU memory is not enough to arrange data 
  • Out-of-core geometry, even hundreds million polygons or hair / curve segments  
  • Support out-of-core instancing and particles if they don't fit into VRAM. Huge amounts of particle data (matrices and attributes) may not fit into GPU memory sometimes, but CentiLeo can render this cases as fast as if we would have huge VRAM.
  • Nested out-of-core technology that allows to render out-of-core amount of particles which may reference out-of-core geometry 
  • Support for huge amount of attributes for surface meshes, curves, particles
  • Out-of-core and out-of-RAM image textures with GPU acceleration for loading and rendering
  • Fast support of dynamic scenes compilation for many objects in parallel on GPU (suitable for interactive modeling)
  • Motion blur (velocity, deformation and multi-step transformation motion blur).
  • Adaptive high-quality and fast scalar displacement mapping (which supports the full flexibility of shader networks, noise textures, etc).
  • Support all particle engines in Cinema 4D with their attributes: native new Cinema 4D particles (since 2024.4), Alembic point clouds, X-Particles, Thinking Particles, legacy standard emitter.
  • Support  MoGraph objects (with multi-instancing) as particles with all attributes support.  

Render Speed and Noise

  • Scalable multi-GPU support (up to 16 GPUs).
  • Noise aware adaptive unbiased path tracing
  • Fast noise reduction for glass
  • Fast noise reduction for multi-layer materials
  • Fast ray traced Subsurface Scattering
  • Fast adaptive rendering with many light sources in the scene. 10 or 100 lights - similar render speed.
  • Fast noise reduction for Mesh Lights with complex shape
  • Two rendering kernels: Bulldozer (good for complex interior or night lighting) and Motobike (good for simple lighting)
  • Denoiser based on Nvidia OptiX that supports image resolution of any size

Materials and Shaders

  • Node-based shader material network interface 
  • Main material: standard CentiLeo material is similar to PBR with several reflection, base, subsurface, sheen, transmission and opacity channels.
  • Material nodes: Emission, Material mixer, Ray switch,  Reference materials
  • Texture nodes: bitmap and video bitmap, noise, pattern, procedural flakes and scratches.
  • Texture coordinate nodes: UVW projection, transformation, distortion, triplanar.
  • Generator nodes: randomizer, ramp, curvature, ray switch, falloff, math, layer, color correction, curve map, remap, shuffle, surface wire, surface side, constant.
  • Attribute nodes: vertex attribute, object attribute, particle info, hair info, mograph info, selection mask, user data.
  • IOR nodes: Thin Film and ComplexIOR features are made with separate nodes and generate respective colors that can be connected to any material channel color.
  • Attributes capacity: Hundreds of bytes of attributes per polygon vertex, e.g. up to 24 UVW, and up to 30 Vertex Color and up to 30 Vertex Map channels support per polygon mesh
  • Access object and particle attributes from nodes using string names
  • Compressed and out-of-core Bitmaps (and video bitmaps) support - that allows to handle arbitrary complexity

Lighting

  • Standard light source types: rectangle, ellipse, sphere, parallel, portal light shape and arbitrary complex mesh
  • Light sources with assignment to different layers of materials (visible to reflection, diffuse, and color scales for them)
  • Emission material with fast noise reduction
  • Efficient processing for many light sources 
  • IES light distribution
  • Directional light spread
  • Gobo / Projector light with textured emission
  • Environmental (dome) HDR lighting with an option to setup different textures for different material channels such as base, reflection, transmission
  • Flexible Shadow Catcher material option with shadow strength controls per light source.

AOVs (render passes)

  • AOVs / Render passes are rendered all at one render frame
  • Light Mix at the post processing: up to 20 Light groups (passes) are supported to change lighting during the post processing.
  • Up to 30 AOV Mask passes for objects and/or materials.
  • Light pass blender AOV which allows to post process the combination of light passes without re-render.
  • Beauty pass blender AOV which allows to post process the combination of reflections, diffuse and transmission without re-render.
  • Arbitrary output image resolution (as soon as it fits to CPU RAM).

Image Post Processing

  • Real-time Bloom
  • Post-processing ACES tonemapping
  • LUT (Look Up Table using .cube files)
  • Post-processing denoiser
  • Highlights Compression, Contrast, Vignetting, gamma correction

Workflow

  • Dockable Interactive Preview Render (IPR) mode supports reaction to mesh edits, objects motion, shading, lighting and camera changes in real-time.
  • IPR also has optional FIN GEO mode which implements Picture Viewer scene state inside IPR with options to change material and camera settings.