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itsmattburton wrote: I'm looking to get this working, i'm a total noob with this plugin so please be gentle! I've seen the option in the material for shadow catcher, I click this on but just get a black plane instead of any transparency when applied to an object (plane). Why do I not get any transparency? I've just noticed with environment object we do get normal operation.

Correction: this is from Kirgman on another thread;

"Actually this is the right finding that shadow catcher weights only for Omni, Infine lights sources and Sky+EnvMap tag.The others lights like Area and Spot don't support casting to the shadow catcher because they have limited directional lighting, e.g. they don't lit the scene behind them."

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itsmattburton wrote: I'm looking to get this working, i'm a total noob with this plugin so please be gentle! I've seen the option in the material for shadow catcher, I click this on but just get a black plane instead of any transparency when applied to an object (plane). Why do I not get any transparency? I've just noticed with environment object we do get normal operation.

from what I understand it doesn't work with Area lights.
but just use omni light or perhaps just an hdri to light for shadows?
Any light except area light should work.

Also, c4d 2023 can use vertex maps with volume mesher objects now!
I hope centileo will work with 2023 as well as r26 when it's updated

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bassigia wrote: Quote 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. Oh, I see. Do you know what other plugin is compatible with Centileo to create this effect? Maybe X-particles? At least in your experience. 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!

https://centileo.com/docs/index.php?COURSE_ID=3&LESSON_ID=45&LESSON_PATH=17.45

I believe x particles works according to the manual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Ntf5upobk&list=PLRWscAlkUVt7j6JLa59fPLObXnALqsQSa

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.

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.


https://youtu.be/R4bYYlAJa8c
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.

https://youtu.be/FpP85o2nBts


https://youtu.be/XCbGCI8iDF4


I forgot to show off mix materials to have layered materials, and shadow catcher option for compositing.

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.

hopefully very soon
I tried to use the latest release in C4D r26.1 and it doesn't recognize the files

Do the Shallow/mid/deep weights have anything to do with RGB (red green green) at all?
When I have red green and blue as the colours it is pure white, but when I reduce the radius of any of them it changes the colour like this.

The Redshift SSS has radius for R G B. Is this similar to how that works?

Other render engines like Octane and Redshift have you use either Diffuse and/or Transmission channels to get proper SSS.
In Centileo do we need to use diffuse or transmission at all, or do we only need to use subsurface to get it to work right?

Does this test seem about right? I didn't think I needed any extra channels until I saw some tutorials and wasn't quite sure.

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Kirgman wrote: I want to fix the issue in the new coming release, this shouldn't work like that. It can be either an internal ray epsilon computation failure. Or it can be related to smooth normals that we have per vertex because when we increase subdivision and smoothness the stupid artifact goes away. Funny thing, but I hope to fix that soon

Hmm yea that makes sense now.
I have a scene with cloth clothing on characters and the only flickering I had like before was a scarf on someone and it was the only cloth I didn't put into a subdivision surface.

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Transfangames wrote: thanks this is what i needed

the node system is very useful for creating materials with surface imperfections.
you can find tutorials from channels on YouTube like Greyscalegorilla.
The imperfections are key to making something look realistic.
it's basically putting a black and white image into the roughness node and/or an image into the bump and/or displacement channels.
Then your objects will have the look of smudges or bumpiness as if they were not simply a smooth surface.

Hint: almost everything should have some form of surface imperfection if you have the time, at least things in the foreground.

Also, there is a node called Projection Node, as well as a Transform Node, which you would need to connect to your image nodes to scale up or down the image so it looks the way you want.
I would watch some node tutorials.
Centileo is pretty similar to Redshift or Octane render engines, and there are plenty of videos about those.

I sent the link for the files.

It is almost 1GB compressed.

I was able to get past the first frame and beyond by disabling my multi-instance rendered plants on my ground plane. I had 3 sets of ~2000 plants scattered around my scene. Maybe so many of those with translucency in each of the leaves was too much?

I have a heavy render with lots of objects and materials, and when I try to render it is black and white and then black frames. If I try to render again it crashes centileo.dll

Only 6 GB of my 12 GB of VRAM is used during the rendering. What could be happening?

When the first frame is being rendered it starts off in colour and then quickly cuts to black and white before the first iteration is finished.

I have tried many options but I can only change the light colour emitted by the sun and not the colour of the sun itself.
Please help?

EDIT:
I just figured out that I can use colour tint camera colour. However, the colour I select is not the same that shows up in the IPR.

I know it isn't fully compatible tested, but does centileo for the most part work in s26 without major issues?
or what are the bugs that would prevent me from using it if I upgraded to s26 from s24?

I got this same error when I uninstalled a different 3rd party render engine but then installed a newer version.
Unfortunately for me it caused my C4D to fail to launch until I restored my windows to just before I made the changes.
Now I get the same error message.

If you wish to remove centileo and never use it again--and you cannot solve the issue through uninstalling--then you may have to remove all centileo icons and render settings and any references to centileo and then save your startup layout.

There is a plugin folder inside the C4D folder that contains centileo. So maybe delete that folder? (move to recycle bin first but don't delete permanently just in case).

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Kirgman wrote: Hi, they should affect the final image. Do you have any post render settings override on the camera or no? I will check this on my tests

I just had default camera settings.
Post-render enabled was checked.


I just realized that I was using a motion tracked 3D camera solve, and I did not have a centileo camera tag applied. However, when I switch to a centileo camera I also have no post-render settings being applied to the rendered image. And even using a centileo camera tag and overriding the post-render I still cannot get the render to use those settings.

Also, I'm using multipass with diffuse and reflection passes.

EDIT:
I unchecked "Send RAW AOVs to Picture Viewer" and now it works.
So if I want to use post-render settings I need to have that unchecked?

How do you access the post-render settings so they save in the final rendered image?
It only affects my IPR images.

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thrimanakatha wrote: footage>interpret footage>alpha>ignore

good point. I will try that.
it makes sense because I'm certain the background must have been saved as the picture viewer shows.

I thought the alpha channel only matters if there is actually an alpha with no background.
I assumed the background would make it not have alpha and save the background instead.
Thanks.
By the way, how is the next update coming?
I hope it is coming along well