Hello everybody.
A few months ago I took an introductory course for Cinema 4D, with a good focus on animation.
So I did some animation tests, which I'm pretty happy with for being a beginner.
One of these, which I will link to later and settings I used, took almost 32 hours to render on my machine!
I specify that I have never used any external render, like Redshift or Octane, I have always used the Standard render inside Cinema, but I recently bought an RTX 3060 Ti, also to take advantage of its computing power.
After this premise, I looked for an external GPU render to understand the potential of this world, which was possibly free, at least for the beginning.
I installed version 0.644 for Cinema 4D R25 without problems and started to see if I found myself with the various settings.
I write here because I was unable to understand well how to move, between the settings of lights, materials and I did not find any resource that explained the basics of how to use Centileo, from the settings in the render settings to how to set the node materials, to how to use the lights, not to mention, and maybe this is a rather special case, of how to convert a project from the standard 4D cinema engine to Centileo.
The only tutorial I've seen is in Portuguese, incomprehensible to me.
Are you planning to provide a tutorial or a complete manual of Centileo functions at least in English?
It will be crucial for a beginner like me!
Many thanks
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How to use and how to set a project from scratch
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User Posts:
Sep 8, 2022 06:17
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User Posts:
Sep 8, 2022 17:48
So you've set centileo as your render engine in the render settings?
one thing you should do is make sure it is set for your node editor as well, so that you can use nodes with centileo. The default iterations for centileo in render settings is 32, I believe. You can probably take that down to 8 if your render time is too long. it will essentially cut it down to 1/4 the time. lights you need to use centileo lights from the centileo menu (you can make it part of your custom palette so the icons are always visible on your window) and mostly adjust settings like the multiplier, and with omni light change the light radius to make it larger (it is set quite small by default and doesn't illuminate anything). Did you already figure out how to get light to work by adding the environment light (I forgot what it is called, I'm not home) that allows your scene to have light and you can also map HDRi images inside that object. you must also use centileo materials only (the default c4d materials might work but only basic colours not bitmap textures), and you can use the node editor to adjust things like surface imperfections with roughness and bump. The nodes are similar to octane or redshift in some ways, so I would watch tutorials using those to get the basic idea of how nodes work. they are easy once you understand them better. Have you used the IPR to get interactive feedback for your render of your scene? If you still have trouble I could try to put a quick video together tonight and show some basics of using centileo. I only have mine working in s24 right now, though.
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- Sep 8, 2022 17:54
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User Posts:
Sep 9, 2022 10:45
Hi ssjenforcer,many thanks for your reply!
I try to reply for everything:
For the lights part, I will try to use the Centileo one
I suppose that I have to use a Centileo camera, right? Regarding my little project, I attach below a static image of the final render of the animation for better knowledge: as you can see I have a model of a boat going over a turbulent sea, an emitter of particles behind the boat and a emitter of smoke on top of the boat, made with pyrocluster material.A floor object under the sea and boat. The sea is a glass material, for x-rays views of the rocks underwater. Rest of the materials are very basic There is a physical sky and his sun for lights, and of course in the standard render settings the GI and AO. First impressions with Centileo: - I add a Centileo material to the floor object but in the IPR nothing shows up. If I add a plane object with Centileo material, I can see in the IPR the plane. - The smoke emitter with the pyrocluster material (and I think I had and environment object linked to it) is supported by Centileo? - In the render settings of Centileo if I add from effects panel ---> global illumination or Ambient occlusion or any other effects, nothing change from IPR panel. Why? It's so shocking to me! thanks! |
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User Posts:
Sep 9, 2022 11:45
As far as I can tell the pyrocluster only renders with the standard/physical renderer.
Centileo doesn't seem to recognize it at all. But you could always render it separately and composite them together. I will link a video showing basics of centileo and one showing how to get node space in s26.1 which might be similar to how you change it in r25. If not you could find out how by looking it up. I briefly show the render settings and under AVOs/passes tab make sure the check the boxes for "Send RAW AOVs (gamma=1) to Picture Viewer" and "Update AOVs in Picture Viewer after render completion" and that will make sure your render and IPR aren't different in brightness. I forgot my mouse cursor was invisible in the first two videos, but if nothing is happening I am trying to move my mouse over something to highlight it. And in the second video I show the projection node, but I forgot to show how useful scaling it can be. Change the scale to make the bitmap image smaller or large depending on how big you want the roughness texture or the bump texture or whatever channel you connect it to. You can't see my mouse but I'm right clicking the empty space above the viewport and selecting customize palettes and searching for node spaces. Drag that into the window and use it to select centileo node space. I forgot to show off mix materials to have layered materials, and shadow catcher option for compositing.
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- Sep 9, 2022 19:46
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User Posts:
Sep 10, 2022 13:40
Anyway, many thanks for the videos. In the "basics of Centileo" It was all clear until minute 4.00, without a english comment speach and the mouse visible, It's very difficult to me to understand the node material part, sorry, it's too fast, maybe you can link me a video of an existing tutorial? Maybe a Redshift one? I don't know if It's the same procedure Regarding the first part, at minute 3.43, I see that the shadows area is very grain, it's for lack of lights? In the next days I'll try to recreate the project with Centileo stuff (without smoke!) and start a render to see the overall speed. Thanks! |
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User Posts:
Sep 10, 2022 15:12
I believe x particles works according to the manual. This is a good tutorial about nodes. I'm not sure about the grainy shadow. maybe it would have rendered fine. It could have been me changing things too fast or not enough iterations. I had it set to 4 iterations for that video for speed. |
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User Posts:
Oct 9, 2022 13:46
Finally I remade the original project into Centileo render and I made a comparison video:
no doubt speed time is amazing but I'm stuck into obtain the first look The main issue I wish to fix is the light reflection on the surface, any suggestion? I attach the video and the settings many thanks
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- Oct 9, 2022 13:47
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User Posts:
Oct 10, 2022 14:44
The light flickering like that is an issue with the geometry having sharp edges or low polygon count.
Try adding a subdivision surface or subdividing the polygons on that liquid object and see if that fixes it. Also, if you wish to try Hot4D ocean simulator deformer there is a free version you can get. I have it working for s24 and s26. If you want I could try uploading my s26 to the cloud and give you it to try. It creates realistic ocean waves as a deformer for objects. |
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Administrator Posts:
Oct 10, 2022 22:18
I think the light flicker issue was fixed in the new version that is not yet released. I hope so
 Need to wrap up things faster!
CentiLeo Chat:
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User Posts:
Oct 12, 2022 09:51
I'll give a try with subdivision and the Hot4D ocean simulator, thanks! And also thanks to kirgman, we'll wait next release with great expectations! |
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