Vi, maybe you can post any screens from the scene? Maybe you light source have too small emission? Or maybe you don't have an Nvidia GPU or up to date GPU drivers? Have you checked this? The download page describes the drivers and Cinema build requirements.

Not this one. There are native coordinates of native Sky object. They have offset, scale and rotation of sky object. They work same way as in any other Cinema object

Sure you can. In Cinema to do this you have to rotate the Sky object that implements the HDR image. For CentiLeo renderer the Sky object of Cinema should add CentiLeo Environment tag, and inside this tag you will see the file link control to HDR file.

It looks like the orthogonal view render is not currently supported in CentiLeo camera. Will have to fix this issue. Thank you for report!

In the viewport everything is so white because of intensity. Instead of increasing intensity in general settings you can increase the overal multiplier in centileo light tag. It's not in percents but a scaling factor for the same thing. This multiplier will not increse the lighting in the viewport of Cinema but will increase the intensity in the renderer.

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ssjenforcer wrote: Also, decreasing my area light size so much, wouldn't that make my shadows sharper? If I wanted to make them softer how would I do that if increasing the area light size isn't an option?

That's the physics of light source geometry. Larger light source area will make softer shadows. Just increase the light source radius using the option "shape radius" in centileo light tag. Larger radius will produce larger area of light source surface and larger intensity. This intensity can be decreased with multiplier. Just play with these settings

The light source geometry simply occludes own indirect lighting. Make it smaller and add more internsity. Omni light source type (of course with centileo light tag) works here too, it will probably need to increase intensity or overall multiplier for much larger value than default.

Actually the node materials appeared in CentiLeo since Cinema R21. And for me it seems that old materials will eventually be outdated at some time, they seem to be kept in flight just for legacy reasons. And news features seems to be added to node materials more actively. For this reasons for R21-R21 CentiLeo sets the node material command to it's menu. It has more features (nodes, connections) I also was thinking to split out SSS from standard material to the separate SSS material just to save some space.

These two screenshots describe two ways of Emission material setup:
1) Using nodes. Here the emission node is connected using the mix material with a bitmap to manage where it's an emission or reflective material. To avoid hiding the bottom left menu of available shaders just click at the button inside red rectangle to stick it on top of other windows. This is native Cinema 4D R25 interface feature, not CentiLeo. To my mind in R23 it was more convenient node interface.


2) This picture shows how to setup emission material using standard old centileo material, here a checkbox on the left is needed to be enabled and manage all the settings in Emission tab. Of course managing complex texture relationships with nodes is much easier.

Simply when you increase the max iterations the IPR will continue computation. But when the IPR has reached some number of iterations and you eventually decrease it from render settings the render will not restart because it has reached more iterations than in render settings.

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ssjenforcer wrote: is there a way to reduce the max iteration in the IPR to try to help speed up animation previews?

In the main renderer settings of CentiLeo, single user control

ssjenforcer, it works progressively. The user first opens the IPR and see how the noise goes, then adjust the max iteration count to the number that gives better speed for desired noise based on few experiments on a given scene with a given lighting.
Default 32 iterations is an example, of course very often a smaller number of iterations is enough.
When I will recover the feature of adaptive rendering based on per pixel noise then these 32 iterations will finish very quickly if for example 8 iterations are already enough. It will look much faster for the scenes where the most part of image has much less noise that the other part.

In case you use node material editor there is an Emission material node that can be used to plug into Output node or it can be combined with Material using MixMaterial.
Otherwise you can use simple not-node based materials, this way an Emission channel is available inside the Standard CentiLeo Material together with Reflection, Diffuse, Alpha and other channels.

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ssjenforcer wrote: Ok, I had disabled the check on my cloner objects but neglected to also uncheck my lights that were childs of the cloner, and so they were still emitting light in the scene and casting that shadow. Turning all their shadow weights to 0 fixes everything.

Basically in the case for this scene it can be faster to make these colored light souces on the Christmass tree with sphere objects and apply an Emission material on them with "imtportance sample" off. The render may become faster if these lights produce local lighting, not global.

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ssjenforcer wrote: It was just confusing me that the beauty showed a certain shadow and the alpha showed extra shadows. Is there any reason that the two modes would show different shadows, when having and not having shadow catcher enabled? Is there a way to make them show the same shadows in both modes, particularly when viewing IPR?

They should be the same on the shadow catcher plane. But they may look different based on the color conditions, the alpha channel is black and white and it may show the shadow masks more clearly on a black background.

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ssjenforcer wrote: Or is the simplest way to remember to change my shadow weights for every light source?

Basically only few types of light sources can contribute to the shadow strength that is casted to the shadow catcher object:
1) Sky + HDRI using CentiLeo environment tag, it has shadow weight.
2) Directional (Infinite) regular light with CentiLeo light tag, it has has shadow weight.
3) Regular light of Omni type with CentiLeo light tag, it has has shadow weight.
Other types of light sources (area, spot) don't produce shadows on the shadow catcher plane. If you want to exclude some lights from producing the shadows then just make shadow weight equal to zero. Or make it a smaller number to make this shadow weaker compared to others. This feature is nice itself and has potential to future improvement.

This video file sequence will be supported in the future. At this moment only static images are supported as bitmap.

That remaining shadow in front of the tree is probably casted using the light source that is not switched off. The bottom line status bar says there are 8 light sources in the scene.
How did you implemented the colored light sources on the tree?
1) If they are regular cinema omni lights with centileo light tags then by default they will cast shadows on the shadow catcher. In this case you can set shadow catcher matte weight to zero for all such lights.
2) If you have implemented the colored light sources on the tree with the spheres and emission material then they will not produce the shadows for the shadow catcher object and will not affect it. This is a preffered way for render speed for this scene if you don't enable imprortance sampling for such emission materials because their lighting is local.
If you want the shadow catcher object to receive the shadow only from the one light source or Sky HDRI then only this object (using CentiLeo light tag or environment tag) should have shadow catcher / matte weight equal to 1. And all other unwanted light sources should have shadow catcher / matte weight equal to zero.

Hi Vlad! Welcome to CentiLeo! Here we prefer speaking English. Thank you for the question! In the future we will certainly translate CentiLeo to Russian language, the challenging part will be to translate the documentation, there will be lot's of work.

Enable Transmission channel for glass, it has IOR for refraction. Alpha channel has no refraction IOR and has no roughness.

Have a look at this post: https://centileo.com/forum/messages/forum19/message1567/83-centileo-for-cinema-4d-044-available#mess...
And this https://centileo.com/forum/messages/forum19/message1590/83-centileo-for-cinema-4d-044-available#mess...
In short, there can be Filter settings in PV turned on/off. There can be "Send raw AOVs to Picture Viewer" enabled in AOVs tab of CentiLeo render settings.
Just check these options

Do you animate the brightness? How many light sources are there in the scene? Btw, it's not easy to detect the issue without the scene itself.

Hi Ivan.Huang, and welcome here! I know automatic material converter is surely very much needed for us. We will start working on it soon, I hope it will be released in 0.67 release and it will include standard C4D materials, Octane and Redshift to convert from.