You're absolutely right! I will make some more tests and send a scene on Monday from my office.

This what I was afraid of. This bug with black marks is about shading normals. I have known about it when looked at normal AOVs. But it appear rarely in the same scene and same conditions. I have few thoughts how to find the exact reason for it but postpone a bit
For example the bug reported by Rodrigo had uncertain reasons and different behavior in the same conditions. Searched it for 2 days and fixed. Will update today together with update for 3ds Max.

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Konstantinos Despotis wrote: 1min 30sec render here, only one window, fullhd.

How does it compare to Octane? You also should know that CentiLeo can be accelerated even more in some future.

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Aimar NL_21 wrote: what happened to displacement maps not showing up anymore

Hi Aimar, they are temporarily switched off by developer. After many changed that were done by 0.48 version there were too many crash bugs and artifacts and that would take 1-2 weeks fix and serious improvements needed. So we have postponed recovering it. I hope to fix it by CentiLeo 0.51-0.53, new displacement solution will be a lot better.

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Rodrigo Bitencourt Rodrigues wrote: Feedback: 0.482 still freezing in the same case of materials. nvidia driver 382.05 nvidia gtx 970 nvidia gtx 970 try change the order of materials tags....it happens too.

+ 0.483 update that fix this bug and related bugs due to other random frezzes, crashes or wrong object parsing

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Konstantinos Despotis wrote: it's actually much faster than octane, the same scene above takes roughly 3 times the time to reach the same level of noise in octane even with adaptive sampling turned on, according to my tests

This is very cool to know! Thanks for the test. Regarding other things will reply tomorrow (today) after sleep

It's known issue from beginning) In the VK group I wrote a big list of small things, that need to be fixed in c4d, and Kirgman promised to fix all in nearest releases. Let's give him a time, and I think he really need to get some sleep)

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Konstantinos Despotis wrote: When I start the ipr window there is some kind of lag, C4D becomes unresponsive for a couple of seconds.

This is normal currently. It waits for 7 GPUs to initialize the state and allocate 4GB of memory in RAM. It's good you note about it since there is a chance to move this GPU initialization to the background thread and make UI responsive. However, if the scene is heavy then it's needed to load it from out of the main Cinema thread that's why it can freeze Cinema for some time to finish the task. This is inevitable.

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Cubic mapping does not work, it is the most basic mapping I think it should work to speed things up.

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Rodrigo Bitencourt Rodrigues wrote: but material tag order still wrong. the most at right material tag will be always the top material on the render over the other tags.

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Request feature: a channel for material alpha(Std Material) it will allow us to use a material stack like we have in Cinema 4D

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Evgeniy wrote: In the VK group I wrote a big list of small things, that need to be fixed in c4d, and Kirgman promised to fix all in nearest releases.

These things are related with proper Material and selection Tags parsing and implementing the Alpha channel for CentiLeo material. I think we are ready now to implement it correctly in CentiLeo and there are ideas how to do it properly. MaterialTag also has few simple procedural mapping and UVW mapping and tilling options. The mappings will be inherited by all cntlBitmaps or cntlNoise in default case. So do tiling options. But in every cntlBitmap you will be able to change default mapping channel to some other mapping channel just for this texture and not for others. I think it will support Cinema behavior with some nice extension on top of it.
Hope to do this feature in 0.49 or maybe 0.50. Already working on 0.49 btw.

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Konstantinos Despotis wrote: If I change the camera during render the ipr does not update, I have to close the ipr and restart it.

Does this problem still happen?

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the tone mapping options are very important (at the moment 2.2 gamma seems really dark for some reason and I cannot go past 4) to overall host app support,

By default there is contrast 0.5 for shadows and 0.3 for highlights. They can make the look darker. If both are zero, exposure = 0, highlights white = 1 then it is raw untonemapped image. Also the roughness parameter of Diffuse channel can make it darker. And there are thoughts that we should calibrate lighting emission values vs similar parameters in other engines to make things more usual for transition. Will try to do that. Also we plan to add several more nice tonemapping curves for the next version very soon wherein it will be possible to combine several tonemappers with sliders. Hope this will nicer.

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( hair, instances, special shaders like mograph, vertex maps etc..) First, for me, it has to match the features of the other players,(sky models, haze, volumes, particle support, instancing and color variations, node material systems, fast sss and intuitive materials and interface, compositing channels and more.

Instancing is supported, just use native Cinema Instance object where the original obect is referenced. And it will be accounted in CentiLeo internally saving the memory on polygons and etc. In IPR there are stats of unique polygons of scene and instanced (that reference the unique). All the rest things are in plan step by step. E.g. more compositing channels will be available quite soon: SSS, Translucent, and maybe Shadow Catcher AOV channels and several more basic AOVs (like depth, UV, textures, lighting).
Color variation will be done using our future shader like RandomShader, MultiTexture, RandomBitmap (connecting folder of images) and so on and so on.
Agree that SSS must be improved and accelerated. There is a chance for improvement. It's so cool effect.
Things like hair and volume are huge for development and are planned to start in several months because right now we still need to do several more basic things.

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it has to play well with third party plugins that are widely used, like X-particles, Carbon scatter, Forest pack( for max) etc.

It's planned, probably before hair & volume support. We have a method to make very powerfull support of really MANY instances or scatters and fast population in the scene. Hope it will work out.

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Lastly, a good converter from the other main players would go a long way, like convert a scene from Octane/vray/corona/physical render etc to Centileo.

This is true and not easy thing to do right now because our own shader arsenal is still not finished. First we must make the structure and feature set, values ranges and defaults more stable. And then start making converters. Before that if we make a converter then it can be changed again and again.

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And a good portfolio of good architectural/product images on your website would attract people, but they have to be good, better to not have any than have some mediocre ones.

This is what we need from community. After we will do few more basic features (at least by some 0.55 version) there is a hope to invite some active 3D people for help with that gallery, with legal downloadable benchmark scene and etc.


Plan for CentiLeo 0.49 - 0.50:
1) Shadow catcher which draws the direct shadows.
2) GGX reflection (think to do it for Reflection2 and leave Reflection1 as Beckman).
3) More Tonemapping options.
4) TextureTag support (Alpha channel, correct order of materials, procedural mappings, etc.).
5) Mesh Lights (emission channel for material or separate emission material).
6) Improve some IPR performance (there are still few stupid places there).
7) Make few very easy things accumulated from user wishlists since few months ago.

Hope these things can be done. If some problem happen with particular feature then it will be postponed for next releases.
After that we will narrate shaders/textures, procedural noise methods and motion blur. And I think that after that we should do node editor for shaders/materials at least in a very basic way. It should become more convenient with it unlike this menu system.