Quote
Kirgman wrote: They don't swap the surfaces. The Falloff node makes the choice of texture in use depending on the view angle. However what you want to do can be achieved with Triplanar at some extent but with some more trivial blend function between the sides. You can rotate the Triplanar using connection with uvwProjection that has coords rotation parameters.

ok.
I guess the tutorial didn't explain that much detail about the textures changing based on angle.
I assumed they were stuck like that on each angled surface.
I guess it shouldn't matter much if the camera angle doesn't really change much.

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?

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.

Quote
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

thank you. I found out how and it works.

Quote

Kirgman wrote: Quote ssjenforcer wrote: Also, was I correct that the falloff node is broken? it always behaves like fresnel setting for me. I might try the triplanar node to see if that works for certain objects. Not broken. It has 2 modes: one for fresnel using IOR and one linear falloff. The second just changes the gradient linearly between 90 and 0 degree view points. Also the node has power setting which changes the curve of the falloff function. Power 2 setting raises the value to the power of 2, the power 0.5 gets the square root and so on. The Triplanar node can accept the uvwProjection to rotate the coordinate system that is used to generate triplanar mappings. Also the triplanar can be nested into each other for some crazy use cases.

But when I use the falloff node in either of the two settings it behaves as it the textures are mapped based on fresnel.
Changing the viewing angle or angle of the object relative to the camera changes the texture mapping (switching them).
Is that not correct? Shouldn't the default setting make the one textures map to different sides of the object regardless of how you view it?
Like if I want to have dust on the top of an object and water streaks on the sides how would I do this when the camera moves or the object moves? The two textures swap surfaces.

Quote

Kirgman wrote: Quote ssjenforcer wrote: I also notice the material tag does not allow me to remove the effect of the 'Tile' check box even if it is unchecked, so I cannot get an image mapped without it always tiling. And the transform and projection nodes don't have any settings to remove tiling. Is there any way to map an image and not have it tile? uvwTransform node has the option "Is Decal". It kills the tilling and you can create a label or decal. But in this case the tilling size is controlled with "scale" setting in the same node with scale = 1 / tiles. It's a reversed value to num of tiles! So basically when UVW projection is manipulated this way you get the valid UVW coordinates in one part of surfaces for your decal and the rest part is invalid UVW region. In any mapped texture node (CentiLeo Bitmap, Noise, Pattern, Scratches, Flakes) there are "out of UVW color" settigns which can determine the color of the area that has invalid UVW. To change projection type you need to connect uvwProjection to uvwTransform. These 2 nodes work same or very similar to native C4D nodes.

thank you.

Also, was I correct that the falloff node is broken?
it always behaves like fresnel setting for me.

I might try the triplanar node to see if that works for certain objects.

I tried adding hair, but even after caching the dynamics I cannot get it to render in IPR or final render.

EDIT:
Sorry.
I just found this other post here
https://centileo.com/forum/messages/forum19/message1390/333-como-renderizo-el-pelo#message1390

I guess I will have to wait and have my bald mixamo character for now

Quote

Filip Stamate wrote: You mean GI from the "Effect" list in the render settings? That's a C4D option, it does nothing for CentiLeo. CentiLeo does its own GI. I don't think any of those effects would do anything. They don't anything for other 3rd party engines either, they're just for the C4D built-in engine. And for lights, be sure to create them from the CentiLeo menu so they get the tag added to them. Don't just create regular C4D lights. And I think only the type of light and intensity have any effect in CentiLeo. Even for the type of light, not all are supported.

When I enabled global illumination in my render settings effect it did have an impact on the shadow of my sphere.
It is very subtle and might not show if you don't look at those images side by side.

Quote
Filip Stamate wrote: That's one reason why having custom light objects would be better than using the C4D lights. It's too confusing.

I noticed you had used area shadows in your light object, but you didn't use Global Illumination. But when I tried adding GI to the render it didn't really affect the lighting at all in that scene you shared.

I also notice the material tag does not allow me to remove the effect of the 'Tile' check box even if it is unchecked, so I cannot get an image mapped without it always tiling.
And the transform and projection nodes don't have any settings to remove tiling.
Is there any way to map an image and not have it tile?

Do I need to touch the shadow setting under the light objects?
I learned that shadow is default set to none, but does centileo have a shadow setting already that is accurate, or is it better to change it to area?

Also, is it more accurate to turn on Global Illumination for this renderer?

I notice subtle differences with different shadow settings and GI, but I don't know if they are necessary with Centileo.

I notice now that GI Illumination is checked by default for the light objects, but GI in render settings enabled gives me a different lighting beneath the objects.

To me it looks best with GI enabled in render settings and Area set for shadow. Is this correct?

Quote

Filip Stamate wrote: Here's the scene: https://we.tl/t-GxKqklNjTn The link is valid for 7 days. I removed the ground texture and replaced the HDRI with a free one. Otherwise it's the same except I added some more scratches on the metal ring. No roughness for the scratches. Scuffs I think are more physically accurate by using bump. Maybe smudges/fingerprints work better with roughness. But keep in mind that if you use anisotropy you need high roughness already so it might be difficult to add extra roughness for other details. In that case probably a mixed material would be better where the smudges are on a different material which you mix with the metal material. Edit: Another suggestions I'd have is to maybe compress the cached textures. After working on these I found out I had a cache of 11GB and I didn't even use that many textures. I cleaned that up and then I tried for one scene alone and I got 600mb which when I zipped was down to 80mb. So the data in them is compressible.

thanks, I'll check it out.
I might have to check my cached files, too.
I tend to only download and use 4K textures.

I was wondering about the roughness and bump because usually the tutorials have some textures/Alpha in one or both. And I found a great surface imperfection site with LOTS for free, and they all come with Alpha for roughness as well as a normal map!
It's called Noedle.
So I figured maybe smudges and scuffs and even scratches might be better using roughness Alpha and bump Normal textures.

I am curious as to why you did not use the diffuse channel in this case.
Is that something only for this particular model using SSS?
I tend to try and map all the textures to each channel I can, but I don't know which ones can be left out for certain situations. Is subsurface scattering one of them?

Quote

Filip Stamate wrote: Yeah, I understand that, but I wonder if there's an option or you intend to add an option to have multiple HDRIs without having to override them. So two or more different HDRIs affect the same thing. Here's a Redshift example, two HDRIs, an interior and an exterior. No override, they both affect everything in the scene (reflections, diffuse, GI etc). You can see that Redshift basically overlays the two (windows on the field). This is an extreme, not really practical, example to show what I mean. Typically I'd use multiple studio HDRIs at the same time to light the scene. I'd like it if there was this option. And, have on/off toggles for what each affects for each of the HDRIs instead of the override system. If you check Redshift or Corona (both work the same way in this regard) you can see what I mean. @ ssjenforcer Yeah, the materials are done by me. On the outside metal ring I used a noise scaled a lot on one axis and then mixed with the scratches shader and plugged into bump. The inside dial with the numbers, it's a cylinder. There I used a bump map with that circular pattern (which simulates brushed metal) and used anisotropy on the material as well. Anisotropy is to get those diagonal reflections. Scratches on front glass are just the scratches shader into bump. I'll try to upload the scene tomorrow if you want to take a look. I just have to remove the HDRI and the ground texture since I can't share those (commercial products), but otherwise everything would be there.

yea I would love to see the node setup.
I thought maybe the center of the metal had that point look to it by using a nearly flat cone.

I guess you didn't need roughness map for those scratches, just bump?
but you use roughness for smudges (or scuffed metal) and stuff like that?

Quote

Filip Stamate wrote: Thank you for the answer. I didn't notice the override function in the sky object before. That's definitely good. But with this you can't use 2 or more HDRIs for the same function, right? Like have two of them affecting reflection, for example? And regarding AO and Curvature in Redshift, like I said, I can't really get the same results with just one of them. Maybe your dirt node works differently and really covers both, but using "invert" in the AO in Redshift doesn't look as good as the result I get fr om Curvature.

did you do the metal texture all yourself?
I'm curious for that dial device how you got the metal tooling scratch marks in a circular pattern around the parts where they make sense.
I'm guessing the front metal is actually a very flat cone object?
Very neat.
and are the glass scratches simple scratch nodes on the reflection roughness or bump or both?
all the tutorials I find are octane, so I'm still almost sure my node workflow is right for most material types.

Very nice.
From what I understand isn't the curvature node just another name for dirt node in other renderers?

I do, however, think that the falloff node is not working correctly right now.
It behaves like fresnel in both settings?
The colours/layers are visible in one angle but then change based on the angle of view of an object under both settings, not just fresnel. This makes it impossible to map a colour or texture to only the top or side of a surface because they flip if you move the camera or object to a different viewing angle.

It would also be nice to have a way to lock all three axis for scaling in nodes like transform, so that we don't have to adjust each axis individually.
And compositing tag to make things invisible but still reflect or block other objects from camera view.

Quote

Kirgman wrote: We have more than Octane in this department: 1) There is a Layer texture node. It accepts 7 input nodes that are stacked onto each other and you can integrate each input texture on top of each other with many layer options like in Photoshop. Just check it. It's a nice way to combine imperfections, noises, bitmaps with this. 2) As for Add/Multiply they are also there. CentiLeo has Math node which supports the basic math operations with input textures. It's just placed in a different category of nodes: not a Node Generator, but Math

I got this with my glass.

I tried also doing the same thing with imperfections mapped to the roughness, but it looked too much like dirt and not like just smudges on glass.
Most of the imperfection tutorials I see only use textures mapped to reflection roughness and bump nodes. It looks right for most surfaces I try so far but not glass.
And I learned after much confusion that for most surfaces I had to use the UVW Projection node for imperfections to work at all.

My car paint looks ok, but I think it could be better. Is there something I could do to improve it? I'm not quite sure how to get the flakes and reflection to look better without layering two materials, with the top one having the flake node.

I am also trying to get car paint flakes.
I tries using a normal map I downloaded and connecting the bitmap node to the normal for the material, but it didn't look quite right.
The edges have a smeared look for the flakes.

But when I tried a simple flake node and attached that to the material node bump channel it looked much better.
is there more to it than that?

Quote
Kirgman wrote: Oh btw this Dirt node is currently just not working as expected. I have to fix it, it's like AO texture

Does the dirt node currently behave like AO?

I found this maxon tutorial (2min quick tip)
https://youtu.be/zSuhHlqabGA
and it describes how to use AO to create surface edge Imperfections. I wonder if I could use something from this to recreate the dirt node for now?

Oh, there is no equivalent to the luminance channel in centileo, so I don't know how it would work.

Quote

Kirgman wrote: Quote ssjenforcer wrote: I tried using the layer node, but for some reason only one of my surface imperfection textures works. Any other one I try doesn't work or show up as a layer. This Layer node has on/off toggles for each other layer, probably you forget them. Also each layer mix mode is different. They are all standart, but need to test to understand how they work for specific case

Thank you, I will try.
I am watching tutorials and I think I understand a bit more now.
I got this to work as a test for using dirt node.

Quote

Kirgman wrote: We have more than Octane in this department: 1) There is a Layer texture node. It accepts 7 input nodes that are stacked onto each other and you can integrate each input texture on top of each other with many layer options like in Photoshop. Just check it. It's a nice way to combine imperfections, noises, bitmaps with this. 2) As for Add/Multiply they are also there. CentiLeo has Math node which supports the basic math operations with input textures. It's just placed in a different category of nodes: not a Node Generator, but Math

Ok, thank you.
I was having trouble because some of the surface imperfection alpha textures I was using were not giving me any results when used as the second layer.
But after trying a few others they work.
I'm not sure why some weren't working. They are just alphas with black and white.

And is roughness the best place to map an alpha to get a surface imperfection?
It looks ok to me, but I can only get it to work so far with regular materials, not things like glass. The smudges don't show on glass.

EDIT:
ohhhhh, it works if I make it roughness on the transmission property, not the diffuse.