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thrimanakatha wrote: hello, apply the following solutions, one at a time and render. 1. Change the hdr (download high resolution hdr from reputed source. Sometime hdr may not have the right light information.) 2. Turn off static noise in Centileo render (if it is already turned off, turn it on) and render. See if the interior flickering disappears or not. 3. Turn off denoiser and crank up the max ray bounce, clamp lights to the max. Also increase the max iteration. Render only the flickering frames and check. 4. Use two different sky objects, one for lighting and one for reflection. 5. Add bounce/fill/ambient light inside the car. 6. Check the poly normals (not the normal tag) of the glass object. If they have issues use align normals. 7. Check the car paint material. Try to use one reflection layer and render. Later add second layer. Inorder to use subd, you need to convert your model to quad dominant. Add edge loops around those round corners.

thanks I'll try.

6. Check the poly normals (not the normal tag) of the glass object. If they have issues use align normals.
I don't know what poly normals means, and I have never heard of quad dominant. I'll have to figure out how to add edge loops.

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thrimanakatha wrote: Are you sure, there is no other light objects? I have same issue in one scene where an area light created weird reflection. The hdr may be creating the highlight around the glass. Try to uncheck the noise remover and render the interior. May not be the right solution but it may help to identify the issue. Remove the normal tag of the car and render. Sometime the normals may be random in those low poly models.

Where is the Noise Remover?
I don't have Denoise Images checked or Keep Raw and Denoised AOVs checked either.
The car didn't have a normal tag. I just applied my own materials for the surfaces and paint materials.
I did try to remove one light at a time and see if that helped, but I didn't notice any changes to flickering.

Also, unfortunately adding a Subdivision Surface to the car parts makes these gaps in the corners where some parts meet. I couldn't find a way to fill in the gap, either.

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Kirgman wrote: It's certainly hard to notice any flicker based on still images. I think the a noisy and lowres video can help. Actually there should be no any flickering because CentiLeo is unbiased. The reflecion may produce bright effects fr om the sun. Also the surface of the car needs some more subdivs to get smoother however this is probably not the source of flickers.

It is some spots on the car that have bright spots turning dark and then bright again with each consecutive frame. These are all one frame to the next, and the changes occur like that for almost every frame. Look at the corners of the windshield. The changes to it just look jarring.

https://youtu.be/_SWDXoxoEVU

Here is a link to it. It is noticeable in the shots wh ere the car interior or exterior are visible, at the beginning and end.

EDIT:
I was just trying to remove light sources and identify any issues, but I noticed now that my car model (free from online) might actually be fairly low polygon. This could be causing the issue?

I have rendered something and certain surfaces have massive flickering in the lighting for the reflections, and I don't know exactly what to do to fix it.
It seems to happen with sunlight object or even just an HDRi lighting the scene.

It doesn't look like anything major in these screenshots, but it happens constantly in just about every frame and it's very noticeable in the video. (you might have to download the photos and flip through to really see the difference)

I thought maybe the exterior flickering was just the clouds in the HDRi moving by the surface reflections, but what would explain the interior flickering on the car panels?

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Kirgman wrote: You are right, the Sky+Environment tag supports only spherical lattitude/longitude HDRI mapping, it doesn't support mapping to camera space like tha Background object. That would be easy to modify. At the moment background mapping can be implemented using a workaround e.g. using a plane object with material with you background and this plane object is placed in front of camera and reacts to camera movements. I think it's possible to do this with scripts but some extra skills would needed. Anyway I have to do it in a simpler way Quote ssjenforcer wrote: Also, were you able to reproduce the shadow catcher bug with Area and spot lights? I assume there is still work to be done with light settings? I have replied in that topic. Not a bug, but a specific detail of light shape. Actually I need to make light includes/excludes from illuminating the objects.

Yes I noticed the include/exclude wasn't working.
There is a workaround for creating a planet atmosphere I was trying to recreate using a spot light, but it wasn't giving me the right falloff. I think it was because the person used exclude to not light the other planet objects, because the spot light was placed at the center of the planet.

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Kirgman wrote: 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. This would create unneceassary shortcomins. On the other hand the Omni light is good, you can place it somewhere and tune the radius to get the neceassary postion and shadow softness. Also why your shadow catcher object plane is so small? Usually it should be larger.

Ok, and yea the omni light does work fine, I just assumed any light should work for shadow catching.
The area light I used was small to simulate the real life light, but even making it bigger didn't work, which was why I thought it might have been a bug.

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Quote ssjenforcer wrote: Also, are there plans to make the C4D background and sky objects work, so that textures can be easily mapped for backgrounds? Do you want to apply materials to Sky object in way this is done in C4D? Currently it only works using CentiLeo environment tag - in the past I thought it was more convenient. Although there is still no Background object support. I think there will be some reconsiderations. Thanks for suggestion!

I thought the environment tag only supports hdri.
I tried it with the 8K star space image and it works, but the image gets stretched too much and doesn't look as good. This is why the background object would work better, right?

Also, were you able to reproduce the shadow catcher bug with Area and spot lights?
I assume there is still work to be done with light settings?

*EDIT:
I figured it out, there is a bug with Area light objects for centileo. Area lights have no Matte Shadow Weight. Only Omni lights and infinite lights do.
Spotlights don't appear to have any Matte Shadow Weight at all either.
_______

I am trying to composite this onto footage, but look what happens to the shadow when I apply shadow catcher to the plane object. The shadow looks completely different than what it should look like. And when I use After Effects it also shows the same incorrect shadow in my photo.
Is there a reason my shadow looks completely wrong when using shadow catcher?

I have one light object only with Matte Shadow Weight applied so I can achieve the shadow I am looking for.
I turned my Centileo Environment Tag for the Sky object down to zero for Matte Shadow Weight so it would not affect the shadow, but doing that takes the shadow away like in the second photo. Keeping that Tag Matte Shadow Weight at 1 looks like this, but it also doesn't have the shadow from my one light but instead has the light from the HDRi.
How do I get a shadow catcher to use my light object in my scene?

It might not be a bug but it is a quality of life improvement if possible:
Creating a light object from centileo and changing the general and light tag settings then trying to 'set as default' does not apply the default setting to the centileo light object.
It does, however, set the C4D default light object to be created exactly in the same way, even giving it a centileo light tag. But this does not apply to my centileo light object icon in the palette.
I am just trying to make my default centileo light always to start with Area shadow and have the multiplier set higher.

So is there a way to make this default for centileo light object icon as well?
Also, maybe not a problem, but all of the centileo objects except the material icon are excluded from C4D undo using ctrl + z shortkeys. So if I create a centileo light or camera and try to undo it will not work.

Also, are there plans to make the C4D background and sky objects work, so that textures can be easily mapped for backgrounds?

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Kirgman wrote: Did you change teh color space in project settings to something not default? Please, can you send me the file? I can't reproduce for my case.

this is what my project settings look like.
I'm not sure where my color space setting would be.

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Kirgman wrote: Did you change teh color space in project settings to something not default? Please, can you send me the file? I can't reproduce for my case.

I'll check, but I don't think I ever have touched that kind of default.

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Kirgman wrote: That's fixed! Sorry for that stupid issue, I haven't tested really well in that area

I am still having issues matching colours with other renderers for comparison.
I have the exact same colour values for HSV using centileo material, default C4D material, and another 3rd party renderer, and centileo colours are the only ones that do not match.
Is there something still wrong with the colour HSV setup?

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Kirgman wrote: Quote

Ok.
I actually always had Send Raw AOVs checked after you told me before that helps to match the IPR and render gamma, I believe.

I will try those beauty passes.
I think I have it figured out for now with this result so far.
This is very cool stuff. I didn't know I could render the background separately even with the transparent background.

What about Shadow pass? Is that possible to have separately as well like other beauty passes?
I am trying to use the alpha channel but it doesn't allow me to control the shadow. The diffuse layer also has the shadow from my shadow catcher plane, and I can't find a way to control its intensity using the extractor effect. Because the diffuse also has the shadow there is always a shadow connected to my diffuse that I cannot control the intensity.

I have a workaround but it's not perfect for edges of the object; I use Extractor and Levels effects with Alpha setting, but it would be nice to have a real shadow pass layer to work with instead.

I am trying to test out using Linear Workflow compositing in After Effects, using a tutorial I found but that uses Octane multipass examples.
What is the equivalent to the 'beauty' pass for multipass in Centileo?
The only multipass layer that shows up in After Effects using the EXtractoR effect is 'background' (which I think in Centileo render settings is called RGBA, but After Effects recognizes it as Background instead). Is this correct?
But all the other passes I made, such as indirect/direct specular and indirect/direct diffuse, don't show up at all--just black screen.
Is specular the equivalent to Octane reflection pass?

I put everything in 32 bit like I was shown, but I don't know if there is any other setting for Centileo to activate Linear and/or Float.
Please any advice?

A question about the preferences for centileo render. Is it ok to set the CPU texture cache to 8000 mb?
It just creates cache files up to that size on your hard drive, or is this referring to system RAM used for loading textures?
I just want to make sure I am not slowing my viewport down somehow.

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thrimanakatha wrote: Quote ssjenforcer wrote: Quote Kirgman wrote: Thanks for sharing the images! Btw, I like the look of the icecubes you did. However there is probably needed to improve the water droplets on the bottles, they are too spherical this site called Noedle has great water dripping Alpha texture maps for free. I wonder if using that in displacement would look good? I was thinking maybe instead of a surface material the water drops could be cloned soft body spheres with random effector for size, that run down the surface of the bottle. I did a test the other day with soft body balls and with only 14 segments and a Subdivision surface applied it ran smoothly. I just needed to keep the soft body tag attached to the sphere object. So with them cloned to the bottle surface as render instances (multi instance I believe doesn't allow for dynamics) it might render well. Maybe subsurface scattering for the ice cubes if you wanted to make a frosted inside look to them. I just watched a neat video showing how that can make glaciers look nicer. Thanks for the site info, I will check. Displacement may work good for simple geometry, may be for the above bottle. I have done several test with other renders using displacement map for similar scenes, but couldn't get the desired look. Too much jagginess and weird refractions with displacement. The droplet is actually cloned hemisphere. I used it for simplicity. I have other scenes with properly modeled water droplets cloned on the bottle surface. I followed a tutorial long ago and created some dripping effect with thinking particles. Unfortunately I don't have access to those scenes now (my hard disk has some issues). Here is the link to the tutorial https://lesterbanks.com/2013/01/creating-animated-water-drops-on-an-apple-using-thinking-particles-i... Frosted look for ice cube is also done with other render, I used bubbles, cylinders inside the ice and applied different ior, for ice used some bump map and roughness in the refraction. I never used sss with highly refractive scenes, too much to calculate. But with Centileo I may try. Thanks for the tips.

for water drops could also try Jiggle deformer or melt deformer to get dripping shape.

but if you want to get something like these images you could find a way to combine streak Alpha with water droplets masked around to create much more condensation.
Maybe try to break up the larger drops with many smaller drops like real like examples.

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Kirgman wrote: Thanks for sharing the images! Btw, I like the look of the icecubes you did. However there is probably needed to improve the water droplets on the bottles, they are too spherical

this site called Noedle has great water dripping Alpha texture maps for free.
I wonder if using that in displacement would look good?

I was thinking maybe instead of a surface material the water drops could be cloned soft body spheres with random effector for size, that run down the surface of the bottle.
I did a test the other day with soft body balls and with only 14 segments and a Subdivision surface applied it ran smoothly. I just needed to keep the soft body tag attached to the sphere object. So with them cloned to the bottle surface as render instances (multi instance I believe doesn't allow for dynamics) it might render well.

Maybe subsurface scattering for the ice cubes if you wanted to make a frosted inside look to them.
I just watched a neat video showing how that can make glaciers look nicer.

Is this yet to be implemented?

the only workaround I can think of is to make a big cube with transmission and subsurface scattering maybe.

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Kirgman wrote: You may convert the hairs to the polygons to render them, I have seen such tricks. However, the native hair & spline support will be added in 0.66 release. I am working on this, but before that need to finish the complex 0.65 update

is there a list somewhere of the main features planned for 0.65?
I saw the roadmap, but I assume that is for all future updates.

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Kirgman wrote: Quote ssjenforcer wrote: also, is it correct to use a math node with add function to combine transform and projection nodes before connecting to a bitmap? I find that usually works, but I had a very strange interaction with a certain material where it didn't work until I removed the transform and only used projection. I suppose I could try connecting them to one another then to the bitmap? Combining them using Math.Add isn't right, because they will add to one another. Correct way is to make uvwProjection->uvwTrasform->Bitmap. Each other port inside inside Projection/Transform can also be textured in some other custom way, for example to add variation to the tiling or offsets and etc.

ok, I was just confused because octane bitmap has two inputs; one for each projection and transform.
your way makes sense now.

EDIT:
Before and after; looks much better now