We finally made CentiLeo 0.48 for Cinema 4D R16-R18! It took so long time, so many efforts. Sorry for very long waiting! We thought were close to release for the last 2.5 months but technical development issues emerged and forced us to do more complex solutions to get right result. And that cycle happened several times. This 0.48 version development was harder than integrating with C4D or 3ds Max .
CentiLeo 0.48 release is mostly about multi-GPU and other efficiency improvements for rendering and memory management. Graphics feature improvements (more shaders, AOVs, improved shadow catcher, motion blur and mesh lights) are expected in the nearest alpha releases which will come out few times per month.
Download here:
Download shaderball:
User manual from 0.44 (yes it needs update):
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.480 alpha (2017 May 2)
[core] Multi-GPU support (maximum 16) with adaptive render data and cache arrangement on GPUs with different memory size. It scales 1.9-2.75x for 2-3x GPUs
[core] Up to 50% improved GI sampling for scenes with harder lighting. Sampling becomes smarter at the cost of more complex computations. For scenes with more or less interesting lighting (interiors, exteriors with several CG lights and/or complex HDRs) it gives up to 50% faster rendering. But for scenes with simple lighting (e.g. outdoor with single area light or simple HDR) where new smart sampling is too smart the rendering is 15-25% slower due to more complex computations compared CentiLeo 0.47.
[core] Solved render initialization problem that decreased render speed in CentiLeo 0.47 by 2x until user manually plays with cache sizes. This solution converts to 2x faster render for production mode and for those who didn’t bother with cache size manipulation.
[core] 2.5x faster scene parsing for complex geometry (when render data is initialized and recompiled in IPR mode).
[core] A lot more fluent IPR experience when camera or post-process settings or other scene data are changed. 3D app viewport doesn’t lag as before. IPR responses real-time for simple data changes (like camera motion, post-effects, object motion or material changes) while user continues moving the UI slider params.
[core] Around 40% less memory needed for geometry storage. Now we pack 25M unique non-instanced triangles (with 1 UV channel, normal and tangent vectors) in 1GB. Wider range of highpoly scenes become less out-of-cory.
[core] 30% faster rendering for scenes with out-of-core geometry (and this accel adds on top of mentioned geometry memory savings).
[core] Up to 4 UV channels supported for each geometry mesh (selectable in mapping slots of shaders).
[core] Material editor preview: much faster and nicer preview render. [core] Each GPU is initialized with as much memory as needed by scene (unlike taking all free memory even for trivial scenes in CentiLeo 0.47).
[core] Render stop criterion is now driven by min/max number of image iterations and also noise level. If the pixel gets at least min iterations and the noise level matches the user defined noise level then the render will not revisit this pixel anymore. Noise detection becomes more conservative and robust now.
[core] Added roughness parameter for Diffuse channel of material (it also hides shadow terminator artifacts on low-poly objects if any).
[C4D plugin] Improved render time in native Picture Viewer mode by updating secondary AOV output less frequently.
[C4D plugin] Slight reorganization of Material editor GUI (all SSS are placed in one tab, Translucency is also placed in a separate tab).
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.481 alpha (2017 May 3)
[core] Fixed bug when one of several GPUs may randomly avoid participating in collective rendering
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.482 alpha (2017 May 4)
[core] Fixed bug when changing any Mix parameter of material (or any parameter which has no effect ) may cause render degradation and crash.
[core] Fixed bug when switching between materials (and/or removing them) may cause render stop.
[core] Fixed bug with artifacts related to wrong smooth normals of mesh.
[core] Fixed bug with artifacts on anisotropic reflections.
[core] Fixed bug when material tangent space doesn’t really change when user enables it.
[C4D plugin] Added Sun item to main CentiLeo menu which adds sun with proper tags understandable by CentiLeo.
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.483 alpha (2017 May 10)
[core] Fixed bug with missing polygons on small objects like plane.
[C4D plugin] Fixed bug with render stop upon deletion of material tag.
[C4D plugin] Fixed bug with IPR random wrong parsing of objects and render freezes.
Known issues to be solved
- If you have several GPUs in computer it’s not recommended to assign the display-GPU for rendering. Sometimes is causes strange behavior. Currently we are trying to fix it.
- Displacement mapping feature is deactivated due to large code changes overall. This feature will be recovered within the next few short CentiLeo updates.
- Sometimes GUI of IPR window may have old style controls.
- 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.
Enjoy rendering with CentiLeo again! And please shader experience related to multi-GPU behavior.
Kirgman