Hmmm, I'll mess with it a bit. I'll send the video when it's done rendering, but there still is quite a bit of flicker where the "brightness"(?) of the light changes for no apparent reason from frame to frame, separate from the added general noise.

Trying with 4 samples and no de-noising and I notice there's a lot of variation in the lighting where I wouldn't expect from frame to frame. I have importance sampling turned on on the emissive light material, could that be doing it? Starting to think it's something to do with my scene. I'm attaching some screenshots with examples. Maybe I can find a temporal de-noising method or something, not sure what the latest state of the art is on that.

Ahhh, the denoiser, that makes sense. Will try increasing sample rate and turning off denoiser and rerendering.

Here is the animation I was working on.

https://youtu.be/1Ij70rKdhAE

Still needs a couple scenes at the end and one at the beginning and to add audio, but you get the idea. This was all rendered with CentiLeo. One question, in the hall scenes, there is a lot of flickering on the lighting and reflections from frame to frame. Any idea what might be causing this? Should I increase the generated samples rate? I currently have it set to 1 sample per frame (compared to ~3 which I used to use, but of course this takes 3x as long). Been going hard on this for a couple of weeks.

This isn't my work but saw this today and thought to post it in case you are wondering about some specific example of machine learning for mesh generation -- it is rapidly progressing, so I expect to be able to use this in "plugin form" at some point in the future: https://twitter.com/jasonyzhang2/status/1467949093829988355.

> How many polygons in total? Maybe your loader adds polygons each frame without releasing memory for ther previous frame? If that's some kind of Alembic it looks strange. What is your RAM size and what's the memory consumption in the Windows task manager during the PV render?

170k per model with alembics for the animations. I reduced model polys to ~17k and applied the same animations and it worked. Ram usage not that bad, when I was rendering before it would immediately crash with the memory error, but now it's fine.

This issue was fixed by lowering the poly count on the models I imported from zbrush. As you say, probably more a C4D issue than Centileo. Everything is working fine now.

I am doing machine learning in a separate application, I use python with GPU integration. I prepare and train models on a freelance basis for companies. I would like to use it for EG mesh generation, texture generation, or motion capture from 2d video, but there's not enough time in the day. Soon enough you will be able to point at a 2d picture or drawing of something and say "now generate a mesh for this". Or take a clip of someone dancing in a video and say "generate animation" and it will add that animation to a rig that can then be attached to other models. Although if I was going to make a plugin to do this, I would probably target blender at this point.

I did see you added matrix color attributes in the update, thank you sir!

I am working on a spaceman shootout sequence that is coming along nicely.

> Btw what's you system CPU RAM size?

32 GB. Currently going through the process of retopologizing and re-rigging. As you said, might be more of a cinema issue than a centileo issue, in the editor I assume there is one level of memory requirements but when you press render and C4D "assembles the scene for render" (not sure what this is called in practice) I could see where exploding memory could be an issue. I do machine learning stuff too and exploding memory can be an issue there where you change a couple of parameters and the whole thing comes down, with the solution being "lower the resolution/model size" etc.

Thanks for CentiLeo, really nice project.

Looking at the density here, I think I may have exported from zbrush with too many polys... Maybe I can re-export, re-rig, and get the animations still to work. Will try this tomorrow and if this doesn't work will send project file. Many thanks.

I took some screenshots.

Imgur link

Also I notice that it does this with physical and standard renderer, so I guess it's more a C4D issue than a CentiLeo issue. Would suck to have to start this scene from scratch and rebuild it piece by piece but I guess that's what I'm looking at to troubleshoot. Pretty sure everything went wrong when I added the alembic files but that's when I started adding animations and so is pretty much the whole scene. Bummer.

I have been using CentiLeo happily for a while. I am fairly familiar with it's usage. I have run into a new problem tonight when trying to render a rather large scene (336mb scene file + 250mb of alembic animations).

It had been rendering fine all day, but I believe after adding the alembic files, I am unable to render in the general CentiLeo renderer, but IPR still renders fine. I just get a black frame.

When I "add to render queue" and start the job, it immediately fails and says "out of memory". I'm a little stuck as to how to reduce the memory usage or if it's complaining about GPU memory or system memory or what? I'd love to find a solution so I can render my scene because it's pretty cool :-p

Ah, fair enough, that makes sense. I suppose it is kind of crazy how many edge cases there are in developing a renderer.

I am following a tutorial and they start talking about it at this timestamp: https://youtu.be/hZOZZhoqyzQ?t=485

It seems like C4D's Field system exposes the color-remap information through a custom field that is then accessed by the external renderer. I have done a fair amount of development in UE4 (and am a web dev for work) so node based workflows are not new to me, but VFX is pretty new.

Is the codebase for CentiLeo all in C++ and then you have a build script with many build targets that builds it for a) each version of C4D and b) 3DSMax? I've also done a bit of GPU programming in the context of machine learning, but again, using GPUs for rendering is new.

I have a spherical field with Color Remapping set. When I apply a CentiLeo material to it, it loses its color information. This makes sense, but I wonder how to pass this color information into the CentiLeo material?

In tutorials that are using Arnold there is a User Data RGB node and in C4D native it seems you add a texture of type MoGraph>ColorShader to color. I'm not seeing any nodes that look like candidates in CentiLeo.

Any suggestions?

Naw, it's not as bad as it seems I think, that was an animation with 91 frames, so each frame was 13 seconds or something like that. I have been enjoying learning to use this renderer (while also learning C4D) and tweaking the various settings. I have a question regarding materials I will ask in a separate thread.

Updating the driver had no effect, but lowering the iterations from 32 to 1 seems to have increased the speed by a factor of 32 or so

Here is a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/e5LJVXi

Thanks, I will play with this a bit, it does look quite a bit faster! For some reason I thought 32 was kind of the "suggested" iteration amount so I didn't play with this param at all.

Looks like it's going to be 21 minutes on GPU vs 1 hour 17 minutes on CPU.

Here is a screenshot of IPR with GPU info.
https://imgur.com/a/lMD2PJ2

Only 1 texture on the screen at this point. GPU is connected directly to the motherboard via PCI-E x16. Not doing any other kind of GPU heavy activity during the render. The hard drive is NVMe. Drivers are 457.51 -- I will check if newer ones are available.

Another test, I tried rendering a scene with a single sphere in the center and the physical renderer in C4D takes less than a second where CentiLeo takes 17 seconds.

Apologies if I am missing something obvious, I was very excited to use my new GPU to help with renders but now find myself learning quite a bit about GPU-based renderers, pretty interesting but also quite confusing.

[ just saw your post above when I clicked "post", I will gather that info and repost ]

Thank you, I've gone ahead and updated to R23.110 and now it works!

I then did a test render of a scene to compare speeds. On i7 CPU, my render took 1 hour 17 minutes. Then I changed the cameras, lights, and materials to use versions provided by CentiLeo and re-rendered the scene with an RTX 3070. That render took over 7 hours!

I notice in the task manager under performance, I can see the GPU usage during the render. There are bars tracking utilization and I can see "3D" stays quite low (3-5%) while "Copy" stays at 100% except when it finishes rendering a frame and moves to the next. And only 4.5/8gb in GPU memory is being used. So all of this suggests to me there is I have a memory issue where any gains I might get from the faster computation on the GPU are negated by the time it takes to transfer data to the GPU.

So my question is, is there anything I can do to improve this situation? 62.1K triangles, 127 meshes, 11 materials, 2 lights.

Hello, thank you for this software. I believe I have loaded the plugin correctly as per instructions, but I can only see CentiLeo mentioned as a Node Space option. Where am I supposed to access the functionality for CentiLeo exactly? I don't see any mention of it in render settings and I don't see any kind of dropdown menu. I am on C4D R23.008 Any advice?