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ds wrote: Trying with 4 samples and no de-noising and I notice there's a lot of variation in the lighting where I wouldn't expect from frame to frame. I have importance sampling turned on on the emissive light material, could that be doing it?

Not sure what's wrong there. Do you mean variation as "more noise" without denoiser? That would need more iterations to resolve. Improtance sample On/Off for emissive light has slight difference between them. To get less or no diffrerence between these two options the "light shift" parameter should be zero, it's placed under material "bump" section.

You may test what settings really work for example by testing the animation in lowres just to get quick renders, then apply denoiser. Denoisers behave this way on extreme low sample counts.

It looks like you use denoiser and low sample (iterations) count. That's why it flickers. CentiLeo doesn't use biased techniques inside.

Actually only experiments will help to find the right settings here. On CentiLeo side we will implement a lot of AOVs (extra images), mask images, some funtionality to combine them in the output. It's all possible because we have a very good architecture to support the render and output of really many images at once.

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ds wrote: Ram usage not that bad, when I was rendering before it would immediately crash with the memory error, but now it's fine.

Have you seen these crashes in Cinema+CentiLeo? 17k or 170k polygons is really nothing, so there can be some bug or anything else, maybe a lot of polygons. I would like to investigate there if you can send me your scene that crashes.

Hi S1512, thank you very much for kind word! Welcome here! We work with great enthusiasm! A lot of very important features are on the roadmap. Volumetrics are there too, but they will appear later than other important things

Solution:
This article from Manual describes the way to enable Cinema 4D textures from Asset Browser for CentiLeo:
https://centileo.com/docs/index.php?COURSE_ID=3&LESSON_ID=57&LESSON_PATH=17.57

It looks like you are doing a very good AI progress! Actually I can't believe such cools things are coming to life! Hope to test them at some point.
Blender is a good path, but I would also recommend not to forget Cinema 4D, first of all because it's also very cool and progresses nicelly, and also because CentiLeo is there

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ds wrote: This issue was fixed by lowering the poly count on the models I imported from zbrush.

How many polygons in total? Maybe your loader adds polygons each frame without releasing memory for ther previous frame? If that's some kind of Alembic it looks strange. What is your RAM size and what's the memory consumption in the Windows task manager during the PV render?

Looking forward to see you animations!

Glad, you fixed this! Btw there are also options in C4D file saving something like "Straight Alpha", "Pre-multiplied Alpha".
Also in CentiLeo render options (in AOVs tab) there is "Transparent Background" option that also kills the reflection of background on reflections as far as I remember

Hi RAin3D_! I have fixed the issue with polygon restriction tag names in Chinese language.
Thanks a lot for reporting this issue and giving the files that really helped!

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

Actually to change the output range of Bitmap image the Map black/white can be changed. They help to scale or invert the image. This is an example of invert:


You can also change the distribution of the values between black and white colors of the image. For example this can be done using CentiLeo gradient node. Just look that middle grey values in the gradient ramp are changed to prefer darker values for the larger part of the input range.

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ssjenforcer wrote: I have the colour texture and glossyness and reflection which I know where to map in the material, but what about metallic?

CentiLeo has roughness, not glossyness. They are reverse to each other. You either reverse the glossyness texture using output black = 1 and output white = 0 or enable "Use glossyness" flag in material settings.
As for metallic - it's not directly supported right now, it can be used to tune behavior of reflection parameters. I will make a slot and a mode for it. Currently the picture of metallic can be assigned to IOR, but the range of bitmap metallic should be adjusted, because for metals the IOR should be larger than one. E.g. you can experiment with metallic bitmap output black = 1.5 and output white = 4.0.
Reflection1 and Reflection2 are absolutelly the same reflection, but there are 2 of them one on top of another one to get more freedom in hand for various metal implementations.

Thank you!
Are you doing machine learning experiments in a separate application to C4D? Or in C4D itself?
I am quite interested in finding a fix to your reported issue.
Btw, in one of your past topics you talked about supporting matrix color attributes https://centileo.com/forum/messages/forum19/message1207/220-if-i-have-a-spherical-field-with-color-r...
This is supported since some time ago: https://centileo.com/news/145/centileo-for-cinema4d-0610/

Too many polygons is not a problem for CentiLeo ) It can eat any counts. You may see an example of our out-of-core technology https://centileo.com/news/147/centileo-out-of-core/
Btw what's you system CPU RAM size?

A lot of metalls can be nicelly implemented with 2 or even more reflection layers stacked on top of each other. Generally there is a medium glossy reflection 2 and clear mirror layer on top of that.
Reflection 1 can be a specular mirror coating with roughness = 0 and IOR = 1.5 while Reflection 2 may have higher fuzzy roughness = 0.3 with IOR = 2 and it will sit below the first reflection. Then a diffuse layer is placed with some color.

Hi ds, and welcome here! It looks strange. Out-of-memory is likely to be not CentiLeo error, but the one of C4D! Also the general PV render doesn't work when IPR is already running. Close IPR and then launch PV! If that doesn't help please can you send a scene with alembic inclusion to info@centileo.com for my investigations on the problem?

I hope to implement a system where shadow casts can be controlled by user per object or in some mask system. For example it's possible to make a system where object doesn't cast any shadows on all other objects. Probably it's possible to make a system where object doesn't cast a shadow on selected objects, maybe using some kind of layer system to determine the groups of objects receving or not receving the shadow casts. Indeed this feature is very much needed.

Of course! This is very much needed. And not only from Octane

RAin3D_, the free version will be available for more time, no worry