I just tried doing a multipass with background and diffuse and reflection passes, and that seems to allow me to have a composited background image from the HDRi.
But why would this not work for a regular saved render?
The picture viewer clearly shows that the background was rendered into the OpenEXR, so why would I not be able to see it in After Effects?

Could there be a bug that is preventing the background from being saved to the image file even though it is being rendered?

I can't figure it out. I have never had this issue before.
I rendered the same as I always have. 32 bit OpenEXR.
I have transparent background unchecked.
Does this make any sense?

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Kirgman wrote: Displacement maps should be baked to high precision format 16-bit or 32-bit, these can be png or tiff for example. If you choose jpg/bmp you will see this

I will try again.
whenever I tried the displacement wouldn't work unless I set the height to something very high, and even then it didn't look the same.

Did you find a solution?
I have tried many times to bake and none of my maps work or look like my sculpt model.

Thanks for the tips. I will try some of them.
I haven't tried foam yet, but there is a 5 part tutorial for hot4d where he shows how to use thinking particles (or some other particle) and pyrocluster to make foam.

do you use Ls liquid?
Maybe if I try more noise detail it will help, but it didn't make it look better when I enabled it before.

Also, do you use ls liquid enabled?
When I try it it doesn't look quite as good. I'm not too sure what that feature does or what to change if it is enabled.
The reflections don't look as good as before.

Did you mean transmission roughness?
If I increase that above 0 then I cannot see the figure objects below the water surface.

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thrimanakatha wrote: You can try adjusting your shader as physically accurate as possible, but you have to adjust your scene also. Otherwise try artistic way (like the game engine) it will be faster and visually appealing but less accurate. This one is a quick setup using a plane with noise displacement. I used a landscape object as sea bed, added a diffuse material as sand. Water is just a plane with 100x100 subdivision, used displacer deformer with animated noise. A clear blue sky with visible sun is used as the hdri ( if I change to other hdri, the result will be different). For the ocean material I used diffuse+reflection+refraction(transmission) technique. Also added a noise texture as bump. Diffuse color is a bright turquoise blue. Reflection is default but adjusted the IOR and roughness value. Transmission value is doing the magic here. Use the value between 0.9-.98. Adjust the absorption color (any blue color) and distance value. Not the best technique, but will work with any other renders also.

Which value is 0.9-0.98?

I tried using diffuse again instead of transmission absorption for colour, and I kind of like it better now. And my normal map reduced scale I think gives more detail in the third image.

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thrimanakatha wrote: Have you turn on depth of field under render settings? Try adding a centileo camera tag to your scene camera and turn on override. Pick the focus object inside the render cam (c4d settings) and increase the sensor width to 10. Adjust the values accordingly.

You're a genius!

I tried sensor width but it had always just made it completely blurry. But now by increasing focus distance in render settings it works.

Thanks.

Maybe I didn't have the override checked in the camera tag.

distance scale 200 cm (ocean water is 500 cm)

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Kirgman wrote: Just start with Absorption changes to some darker blue with radius changes and leave Transmission basic color as white

When I darken the Absorption blue colour in Transmission channel it makes the water appear grey and not blue.
What do you mean radius changes? Which channel? I thought only subsurface has radius. Unless you mean the distance scale?
I had turned off subsurface and just used transmission absorption to get the blue colour.

When I reduce the HSV v value I get the grey look. But if I reduce the h value I get this nice light blue near the rocks.
I also just turned on ls liquid (not in these screenshots). That helps for materials for liquids?

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Kirgman wrote: Hi ssjenforcer , Why do you use subsurface for water? It's more needed for organic surfaces like skin, wax, cheese or fruits/vegetables. The radiuses of SSS layers tell how deep the light can enter under the surface with certain color and weight. The colors and weights of layers are renormalized if you use large values of weights (in case their sum exceed 1). But returning to water you should use reflection + refraction with the same IOR, e.g. IOR = 1.4. Also for sea water you can use Absorption layer of material where you can make some dark blue color of absorption and a radius that tells at what distance the light will turn to absorption color. Just make experiments. Also it can be possible to combine with translucent + absorption layer potentially using mix material with another material that holds this just to make the peaks of waves with some white effect for foam.

The tutorial I watched used SSS, which I thought made sense.
But where is absorption layer in centileo?
Are you referring to absorption in the transmission channel?
I also tried using transmission set to 0.3
but you suggest translucent instead?

This is my new attempt. The second image is with the normal map scaled down to 0.1

I tried to sculpt and there are very few tutorials or forums with any information whatsoever. I couldn't get the normal and displacement maps to look anything like the sculpt model no matter what bake settings I used.
If nobody has any ideas for now I would have to just subdivide the original model and sculpt without the tag or baking.

This is updated, using a normal map and noise for the bump.
I tried changing the subsurface radius scale and some of the radius values.

I got Hot4d to work with S24 (I assume the tutorial also works for 25 and 26, but I can send anyone my working plugin if they want), and I am trying to get a good water material.
Does anyone have good tips?
I am using only reflection and subsurface and bump right now. I know it can look better.

I am also unsure exactly how the subsurface values work. Are the weights of each layer combined to total 1 or can each weight also be 1?
And I am not sure what the radius means for each layer.

It looks like he has NVIDIA RTX A5000.
interesting GPU.
Do you have the latest driver, and is it a studio driver instead of the game ready driver?

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Kirgman wrote: Hi Christopher! And welcome here! Please, can you upload this file with SSS so I can test it and debug. Just solid light pink and dark pink shouldn't be there? There shouldn't be anything special with SSS and motion blur. Maybe I have missed inserting time value to some function. Btw, you can watch how motion blurred object lookd for every time if you change the shutter open/close range (in render settings) fr om 0..0.5 to the range like 0.3 and 0.3 (just immediate time moment). There is some limitation for IPR and motion blur: IPR doesn't show more than 4 motion keys in a preview. But if you render from Picture Viewer (or IPR with FIN GEO mode) then you will be able to see all motion blur keys enabled in render settings. Max ray bounces - limits the total bounces of light path travel in the scene (from camera to light). Max diffuse bounces - limits bounces from surfaces with non-zero roughness. These 2 settings may be valuable for example when you lim it the "Max diffuse bounces" but have a glass object with internal reflections and refractions and for this you increase "Max ray bounces" and get deeper render result and slower render only for this object but not for the rest. Depth of Field is moving to camera. Focus distance is controlled from camera object. The rest things (like sensor width, blades) will land there too once I dig there again. Caustics are currently blurred. However what you see around semi-transparent objects is not caustics but a fake transmission with forced IOR = 1 (for faster render in general case). Real precise caustics and dispercion will be addressed later when other production features will be implemented. Metropolis is currently not used internally. But it was in the past. Even after all improvements that we did for it there are still so many problems for animation, motion blur, slower for everyday production scenes, many ray bounces and etc. We will continue to investigate though. Anyway, the next 0.58 is about render time optimizations, so stay tuned

I tried using focus distance in the camera but it didn't affect anything at any value extremely low or high. I couldn't get any depth of field to work.
is this working yet in the camera object?

I'm testing out a technique I had heard about where you create darkness in a certain area by adding a light object with negative values, so instead of adding light it removes it instead.
It shows it working in my viewport but not in the IPR.
Is this possible? I can get the same effect for now with a flag object to block the light, but I was hoping this would work somehow.

I was just trying to look into loading a vdb explosion and noticed it wasn't rendering. Is it going to be integrated with the volume loader inside C4D or be a separate volume loading system within Centileo?
Also, is there plans to have atmosphere as part of this system or separate as well?

EDIT:
nevermind. I didn't realize I needed to put the C4D Volume Loader as a child of the Volume Mesher.
It works quite well Also, here is a site with dozens of free vdb explosions.
https://jangafx.com/software/embergen/download/free-vdb-animations/

One thing I am having trouble with is positioning the sun for the sunlight object.
It is very difficult to find the correct latitude and longitude to position it exactly where I want it. Is there a way to make that easier in the future?
And if I want it in a certain direction I am unable to lower the sun unless I rotate the entire scene toward it on the opposite side, because it doesn't seem to want to set below a certain angle in the South latitude.
And will there be a way later to make the sun visible to the camera?

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Kirgman wrote: Yes, it's true finding. Actually this is very easy to do, but I was lazy in this part of work However it's possible to do all these shapes using any shape of regular object and applying an emissive material for it.

ok. But that is for omni light effect really. I was trying to see how to better use area lights.
Or could that work by applying emission to a plane object, I suppose?

hopefully later there can also be area light blocking using texture maps? Like to get a window blind effect on a light source.