Hello, I need to create textured lights (light projection) with centieo.
I couldn't find a way to do so. Emission material is not providing the exact look, it is spreading the light too much.
Usually I work with a spot light/ ies light with the desired texture, but centileo seems not liking the texture in light.
Any idea?

Centileo with mesh emission and spot light

C4d physical render with spot light.

The second image is I am looking to recreate but with GI and bounce light.

In Blender Cycles I already did.

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Kirgman wrote: Quote thrimanakatha wrote: Okay, I connected the bitmap alpha to material alpha, still same. Have you enabled the Alpha channel in the list of channels of material? It's off by default. There are toggles for all layers in CentiLeo Material

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ssjenforcer wrote: Quote thrimanakatha wrote: Okay, I connected the bitmap alpha to material alpha, still same. did you remember to check Alpha checkbox to enable it? look at your material editor on the bottom right and see if Alpha is checked (enabled). I started making this mistake a lot at first when learning to use nodes. I would always forget to enable bump for several minutes trying to see results.

Thanks, I forgot the alpha toggle for Centileo. Recently I was working in Blender and used the same workflow.

@Kirgman Thanks,
The ice and water look nice now. I never tried increasing the clamp values before.
Changing the IOR of ice to 1.5 and absorption color and distance seems to solve the issue. I have tried these settings before but was stuck at distance value and also with the default clamp light settings there wasn't much clear refraction happening on the middle ice cubes.

In prorender, there was refraction color added to the ice and tried the same color in Centileo before, it is rendering in different way. It seems like both renders handle things differently. I used the same material settings from Centileo (your settings) to RPR and the render is extremely different.




The post effects influence the scene very much, I did a couple of test.



Centileo with post effect (default)


Centileo post effect turned off


Centileo with custom post effect (override)

Did some adjustments on the same renders using c4d filter.

Centileo post effects default + c4d filter adjustments


Centileo post effects off+ c4d filter adjustment


Thanks a lot looking into the scene and providing the solution. It may take a while I shift my workflow into this amazing render. Waiting for the next update, have you finished yet?

Okay, I connected the bitmap alpha to material alpha, still same.

Hello,
I am facing problem with png images with transparency. See the screen shot

PNG file doesn't use the alpha correctly. Cinema 4d standard render has the same issue with transparent png file, but once I connect the alpha with material alpha and turn on image alpha it will be good. In centileo i couldn't solve this issue. Connecting the png alpha to the material alpha is not working.

In the screenshot Left square one is png and the right one is tiff, both have the same circle with alpha.

Thanks, without a proper documentation it is hard to achieve the result in proper way. If the documentation take time, why go for 1minute quick video tips? Every week 1 or 2 videos will be enough.

Thanks Kirgman, the overlapping concept is there and I used it before,arnold use the same concept. It is helpful in glass objects(visible thickness) but for thin objects like pet bottles overlapping is tricky. If the bottle has complex shape (i always faced that) overlapping water surface inside the plastic bottle is not possible.
That is thin film is required. C4d doesn't have thin material, so I used minute extrution (micro meters!) For bottle towards inside. This will give thin film effect. Corona, rpr has this material so single sided bottle is good enough.
I have done several renders with double sided thin plastic and single sided thin materials before.
The render produced by Centileo for the bottle is good. I have no complaints there.
I am asking about the tank water and the ice cubes.
I dont have much technical knowledge, does Centileo calculate internal reflections? Like
https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/plugins/servlet/mobile?contentId=40111252#content/view/40111216

Now a days I rarely use Maya and Arnold so can't remember much. Arnold is super slow in Maya and the same scene won't render in my pc.

Sure, I sent the scene but with a different bottle.
Icecubes, water and hdr is packed with c4d and blender scene.

Without droplets,

Centileo
iteration= 2 ray bounce 25, post effects on, exposure=1, denoise= off
is liquid = on for water, ice
(fixed wrong material on cap grip)



RPR, no change, denoise = off , no thin surface turned on,


Kirgman, now both renders are almost equal (forget about exposure) how to get the ice more transparent in the center? More ray bounce? I used 25.
I will do more test on other scenes, and post the result.

Lighting and HDR are the same in both, however I found that in Blender the hdr is rotated to back (may be while exporting/importing fbx applied world transformation to the whole scene). Rotating the hdr to 180 solved the highlight mismatch. For further comparison I turned off the real lights and rendered the scene.


The bottle is made of double sided mesh with very thin thickness.
bottle water is solid geometry and is scaled down to 0.96 in x and z and 0.99 in y. To solve the intersection problem.
Droplets are hemisphere without any holes (I will remove the droplets and make another render soon!, may be the droplet placement has some issues, both renders shows strange result).
ice is a cube
water body is a cube with displaced top.
outer is a tank geometry with thickness


RPR render Blender



High contrast turned on in color management, view transform = standard


No color management, view transform = standard

Here is the render settings
ray depth = 16
Diffuse = 2
Glossy =8
Refraction =8
Glossy refraction =8
Shadow =4
Ray epsilon=0.02

Max samples=356
min samples=128



Centileo

iteration =2
raybounce =14


with post effect


without post effect

RPR seems to produce more lights/exposure than Centileo with same HDR. There is no exposure/ camera values changed in both renders. RPR may be shooting more rays?


with ray bounce =25 and post effects on


with c4d filter exposure=0.5






is liquid= on for water inside bottle, droplets, ice, water body, centileo exposure = 1

And here is the renders with reflection on/off for the bottom water layer.


No reflection



with reflection

IOR value for refl and refr is 1.33, no roughness, blue tint for refraction color.

@Kirgman,
It seems increasing the Ray bounce value to max 25 solves the issue.
In my previous render the bottom water layer has higher reflection value than the refraction. All other materials has same reflection/ refraction IOR but I didn't use pure white color, and added some roughness. In this test I removed all the roughness and used pure white color for refraction (for ice and bottom water used light blue color. Roughness added for the water tank only.
GTX 1660 card is used for rendering. Centileo in C4d 24 and RPR (prorender) in Blender 3. I tried to match all the materials as I can, then adjusted the lighting.
It seems doing a lot of trial and error Centileo can be matched to RPR. Previous renders were done with denoising on and this one without denoiser.

1920x1080
Both renders were run on 6min,
no denoiser, no dof, no motion blur



Centileo 2.25 iteration ray bounce 14




RPR 356 samples


More test renders with dof and denoiser


Centileo dof denoiser ray bounce 25


RPR with dof and denoiser




I really like the ice and water renders of RPR, any idea to push Centileo to do so?

Definitely Centileo can make good renders, waiting for Ambient occlusion, render pass, caustics, volumetrics etc.

1st Image Centileo C4d 2 iteration Denoise 3 min 25 sec
2nd Image Radeon Pro render 256 Denoise 3 min 34 Sec (GPU only) I didn't add Ambient occlusion because Centileo doesn't have. (The image is noisier because of the denoise settings applied, and I tried to match the render time with Centileo.

You can see how the glass, water, ice, plastic behave in both render. It is the same scene, same textures same color.

Centileo is offsetting the diffuse color, blue is darker in Centileo. The blue color applied on label and lid is hex 4A8FFF, there is something affecting the color in Centileo.

Refraction seems to be limited, (I don't know how to increase the transmission rays in Centileo.

Centileo is not rendering the water surface transparent (I tried using a plane and a box), it only reflects. Refraction seems to be black. I observed similar behavior in Cycles render also.

Increasing the light intensity seems to be removing the black area in bottles and ice, may be need more rays.

I am facing difficulties in similar scenes, with lot of transparent objects Centileo struggles. While radeon prorender seems to be forgiving and with thin material option it is easy to render PET plastic materials.


Prorender is giving more option, flexibility and material presets. Once Centileo reaches its full functionality I will render these scene again.

Kirgman, it is not a comparison post, and I don't want to offend Centileo render. I just want to show you what lacks in it.

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Kirgman wrote: thrimanakatha , sure! All you tell about is what I am also thinking. Actually CentiLeo output node doesn't expose the viewport color to the node in that node area. This viewport color port is one of the ports in output node parameters, and you can connect from there. The idea was to add the ability to connect any texture to this slot (diffuse, reflection textures, roughness, many others) just for tests and modeling purposes. But it's better to start with diffuse texture by default for viewport color and change it for different if something is connected. Sure more render passes are in short term passes, they are very much needed. Also the current development version has large accelerations especially for scene geometry compilation that happens between modeling and rendering passes.

Thanks Kirgman,
I have some other requests also,

1. Make the IOR value like other 3d renders. It is very difficult to convert 3rd party render scene to Centileo because of IOR value. Most of the renders I work use standard IOR values for reflection/ refraction, as an artist I find it is easy to replicate materials from one renders to another. Just match the color/ texture, use the standard IOR values for metals, plastic, glass or any other real world objects and then match the material by adjusting the sliders.

2. Light nodes - IES, light falloff, gradient lights etc. It is essential for architecture and motiongraphics. Blender Cycles recently introduced those nodes and is really helpful.

Will update the list soon.

Hello,

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Kirgman wrote: thrimanakatha , as I already said you can setup the viewport color or texture in CentiLeo Output node, there is a viewport color slot there

I can't find the viewport color slot in the Centileo output node until I drag the color/bitmap result to the material output node. It is confusing for me (I work in different 3d programs and renders) especially checking the textures.
Texture appear only on Ipr/render may be good for some people, for me it is not. Working on some projects having 100+ textures (imagine a city block with different buildings, windows, traffic, people) and I want to animate the window textures (random lighting, color etc) it is better to do in viewport than IPR (Centileo is doing a good job in quick refreshing the scene without a single crash!).
Sometimes even in product rendering I have difficulties with the non color/texture behavior of the Centileo. Sometime I have to apply different labels on something (imagine a bottle) and the label dimensions are different; viewport is better for adjusting the texture/uv coordinates.
Slowly Centileo is becoming my favorite, still waiting for render pass (ids, channels etc.) and video/animated textures. Due to the lack of render pass I use Maya-Arnold/Blender-Cycles-Pro render.
I remember using Thea Render trial for Cinema 4d long back ago, it was super, photorealistic and has most of the render passes and support for c4d materials and textures. Unfortunately they stopped developing Thea for C4d.

Please make thin glass material also. The current material setup is not providing thin transparent materials like PET bottles (may be I couldn't make it look better like other renders).
I read it before that you have priorities for Centileo, I just mentioned my views.

I also have the same issue, Centileo node material doesn't shows the color in the viewport, just white. It is difficult to work with all objects in white color.

I did some test with Centileo recently. The coin renders were pretty fast on my GPU (GTX 1660) with all reflection and depth of field turned on.
Render time is around 15 sec/ frame.

Watch the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwizsWtw3JE (I can't embed the video here)


Though I did some adjustments in the render,
No displacement used
Max iteration= 1
Ray bounce = 4
Denoise image= on

Scene contains
hdr =1
light- 3
400 instanced coins with 6904 poly face.
Depth of field =1

Hello,
I also faced the same issue, Centileo doesn't work with a real light source. In your scene file HDR image is applied via a material to the sky object. It wont work, just add an environment tag or use environment from centileo menu.
Also if you have textures applied it should be added via centileo material. Standard Cinema 4d material will render the color only, not the texture.

Hello,
I recently started exploring Centileo c4d version. It seems very promising render.
I have some doubts,
How about getting object buffer (object masks) while rendering?
How to get material id/ object pass?
The AOV pass is really limited, need GI,depth, motion vector, object and material id passes.