Hi,

I just stumbled over this renderer recently. Have been using c4d for 25 years now, upd ated Prime through MSA until the big R21 changes (no prime anymore, subscription), got the full version that way but was then stuck as subscription is just to expensive for a hobby user. I bought Cycles4D when it was released, but it didn't work great for me and then they turned this into a subscription trap as well so I was stuck with a pretty early version. After some years of not doing much with Cinema I just wanted to start again and searched for Render options. Tried out ProRender, which doesn't work at all on my machine. So I was really delighted to find this. I got into it pretty quickly and I am amazed by the speed, quality and pretty good integration. Never thought I would be able to do this in my old R21 on a laptop with RTX 4070...

Keep up the good work and I really hope you keep supporting R21 as long as possible. And if you release this commercially then please consider a non-subscription solution as well

So, after some hours of working with CL, I got some requests / remarks, of course

1. As requested often by others, volumetric rendering would be very cool. I am not only talking volumetric lights, fog and stuff, but maybe even solid objects via VDB (I am thinking about medical data converted from DICOM to VDB), which uses other raymarching / shading principles though i think
   
2. Using imported VDB, volume builder results and fields as 3D textures on surfaces -> this would be a huge help for texturing and effects, e.g. it should be possible to use the distance of the current shading point to another object as input (similar to the proximal shader, but on stereoids). You could draw with this on surfaces... Not sure if newer versions of Cinema support this, I am out of the loop a bit. But using these great tools for rendering as well seems like a no-brainer to me
   
3. Extended gradient shader: the cinema version offers much more options here and I think this is a very important tool. For example, I missed the possibility to directly se t the center of a spherical gradient as world coordinates
   
4. Rendering directly into the viewport: the IPR is great, but direct rendering in the viewport would bring this to the next level
   
5. Bevel shader would be great
   
6. Render-time Booleans/CSG: this is a bit wild, but there was a plugin-shader many years ago that allowed bto render booleans without using cinemas boolaans at all, just by turning visibility of objects A and B on and off based on counting ray-surface intersections. This is actually an old technique that POV Ray and other academic Raytracers did 30 years ago. This is kind of genious, never understood why this is not supported by more renderers. That way you could bool out many details without introducing shading artifacts. If this could even be combined with render time-beveling this would be huge
   
7. Support for a shader language to lallow extensability, maybe OSL
   

I know this is a lot. I am also software developer and always thought about what I am missing in cinema but never got around starting plugin development myself. So this is partially wishfull thinking and some of these things are also not standard in other engines. But maybe some of these ideas make sense to you

I hope I really find more time for C4D & CentiLeo

Best,
Chris