Thank you! Of course there is a huge list of improvements that we are going to make. Currently we are doing render speed optimization, hair and spline support. Next we will make material converter from some other renderers, add more post processing options, add more AOVs and masks for render images. We will also make object exclusion system for light sources and render images and so on

Have you seen that Cinema 4D selections work with non-Chinese symbols? This should be fixed in the next release quite soon.

Quote
RAin3D_ wrote: Kirgman, Is there a social software and an official communication place for this renderer?

There is a Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/centileo
And Facebook page where we duplicate the news from the website https://www.facebook.com/centileo
In few steps later will launch the project on other social platfomrs too.

Quote
RAin3D_ wrote: Kirgman , I have sent the email to your account. Can you check and receive it?

Hi RAin3D_, thanks for file! I have already found the problem thanks to you. It was related to Chinese names of selection tags and materials texturetags referencing these selections by Chinese names. I will fix it quite soon, the mistake was small
At the moment you can rename you selections to some name in English characters or numbers to make it working

Thank you, looking forward for files to test the issue

Thank you very much text-tree for kind words! And welcome here!
I understand what you are asking for. Actually currently we have no any material/shaders converter from other renderers to CentiLeo and this creates a problem to get more users. Manual material conversion is a long and boring thing and so material creation from scratch is the way to go.
However, we plan to start developing material converter from C4D and Octane, Redshift, potentially the converter can be open-source.
We will start doing this after 0.66 version will be released. Still 2 versions to wait for

These light types are simply not yet supported. This will be fixed.
Currently only those types are supported: area with rectangle shape, spot, infinite, omni.
The omni has radius parameter in centileo light tag to make a sphere from it.
Infinite light has lighting angle parameter in centileo light tag to change the softness of shadows.

Additionally there are mesh lights in CentiLeo. You can make any geometry object of any complexity and assign CentiLeo Emission material to it. In node space you just connect Emission node to the Output node or you can use a mix combination of Emission and non-emission materials and connected to Output.
There is a cylinder light shape on you picture. Just use CentiLeo mesh light, they are very fast.

Quote
hu wrote: I found a solution, I opened the wrong option

Oh, thanks for finding it by yourself!
Honestly, I have forgotten about this option (send raw AOVs). This option is needed to get rid of any postprocessing from images, save them as HDRs (EXR) and continue processing them in other image processing application.

Hi ssjenforcer, it looks like you are doing smart experiments with shadow catcher!
Actually the cast from soldier shadow catcher plane behind him is a shadow. And it looks like the light source is emitting from the direction close to camera position.
To change this I suggest to add the second Sky object + CentiLeo Environment tag to the scene without HDR image file but just with a white color.
This second Sky object should be placed in the scene next to or as a child to the main Sky object. This second Sky object is placed as the override to Shadow Catcher / Matte of the first Sky object. The override settings are placed in CentiLeo Enviroment tags. The HDR file and direction of the first main Sky object may be not changed and lighting of objects (diffuse / reflection / sss, etc) will not be changed when Shadow Catcher / Matte slot is overrided by the second Sky. This matte ovveride will only affect the shadows casted to shadow catcher plane by the Sky.

Actually CentiLeo is currently constructed so that all scene objects and light sources influence on each other in a physically based way with a few overrides. Making the masks to exclude objects from camera view, making light source include/exclude lists and/or masks is thing that we need and of course it will be implemented into our engine too. Fortunatelly, this is not a very complex feature/

ssjenforcer, as for default light settings it seems you have some non-default Exposure settings or probably scene scale. When you start with a new reset scene in Cinema then CentiLeo light intensity settings produce good lighting for the objects around them without burning them. Also CentiLeo light intensity multiplier is a multiplier in centileo light tag! It just multiplies the Light intensity and color of native cinema light source object.

Quote
ssjenforcer wrote: When I tried multi pass non of the layers other than the Alpha were transparent backgrounds. Is that because of using separate alpha?

Yes, this is because of this. I have tested Cinema 4D exactly for this for several hours. So, it has Alpha channel for rendered image and it's applied on not only for main beauty image. It can have Separate Alpha On/Off:
1) In case it's Off then the Beauty image has transparency, but other passes still don't have (Diffuse, Reflection).
2) But in case it's On we get all images without Alpha channel and Alpha channel itself is stored as a separate image.
I think that case 2 is good, because you can re-apply this Alpha image to any image pass in AE. I don't have AE now, but I think it should be possible, it looks as something basic: the 4-th channel

In the future I will make a functionality to determine the images with object masks where you can determine the group of objects that go to any other output mask image. Also render objects or groups of objects separatelly from the other scene in image but with GI influence.

Why you background is red? Why you don't do it with ground plane + shadow catcher that can be transparent with semi-transparent shadows?

Looks strange. I have retested on my C4D. It was ok.
Please, can you send me your .c4d project file to info@centileo.com for tests with your settings?

Hi seiwen, welcome here!
Sorry for confusion, Dirt node currently is broken. We have to fix it in future releases.

The composite tag doesn't work yet in CentiLeo. I know it's needed very much, but still busy on other features.

I think we have missed the Multi Pass checkboxes in render settings. They are enabled automatically when user enables the Light passes or Beauty passes, but it was missed to do so for Alpha channel. But anyway I recommend to select what is highlighted on the image below: the Alpha channel, Diffuse, Reflection, and Multi Pass / Post Effects on the left menu as highlighted.
Then after re-render in PV you will see the image and layers in Layer tab. If you select "Multi-Pass" option in this tab the checkbox "Layers" will be activated in the Save menu for this image (see at the left side). This works for manual saving after render is done.


But really the Alpha channel output can be enabled if we make automatic render image save. This can be enabled using Save Settings (keep attention on highlighted settings):
1) To save the regular image (beauty main of centileo) you use the usual Save file of the Regular Image tab.
2) To save the layers you have to setup the Multi-Pass Image tab settings and setup additional Save filename, also use layer name as suffix.


3) If you enable the flag "Separate Alpha" in Regular Image tab the Alpha Channel will be outputed as a single separate file with "A_xxx" prefix.


4) If you disable the flag "Separate Alpha" then Alpha channel will be embeded to regular image (our beauty image) and it will get transparent background and semi-transparent shadows:

To edit the node materials there are few steps:

1. Open Cinema 4D in developer mode with Administrator rights. There are 2 options to do this:

1.1) Edit the properties of Cinema.exe shortcut. This shortcut of exe file can be found in windows task panel. In the properties of shortcut edit the launching object to this string:

Code
"C:\Program Files\Maxon Cinema 4D R21\Cinema 4D.exe" g_applicationRepositoryWritable=true g_developerNodeEditorFunctions=true g_descriptionEditorDeveloperMode=true

It just changes the command line params to developer mode when you launch Cinema using the shortcut.

1.2) Alternatively, open CMD.EXE with Administrator rights and type the same string to CMD and press Enter keyboard button

Code
"C:\Program Files\Maxon Cinema 4D R21\Cinema 4D.exe" g_applicationRepositoryWritable=true g_developerNodeEditorFunctions=true g_descriptionEditorDeveloperMode=true

2. Since you launch Cinema in developer mode create CentiLeo node material, right-click mouse on material node and click "Edit Resource".
In the opened window you will see the interface of this particular node.

3. Change the language interface to Chinese in the node editor development (zh-CN) in the top left corner.

4. See the orange highlighted strings as on the image below to get the idea how to modify the strings that are used as translation.



5. The other CentiLeo nodes can be selected for editing in the top left corner in "Id" line (2 rows to the down from Language).

6. After you have finished your editing you should click to the top menu item Database and select "Save all Databases".

7. Your changes will be saved in the files in this folder (this is the CentiLeo plugin folder and it's internal "res\nodes\" subfolder)

Code
C:\Program Files\Maxon Cinema 4D R21\plugins\CentiLeoR21\res\nodes

As you can see currently this folder contains 2 .json files. They contain a structure and a language file of the interface. We are interested in the zh-CN language file only, don't pay attention to the others.
8. The resulting .json files for R21 in our example after you have saved the Databases can be copied to the other plugin versions for R22-R26 or 2023. All .json files are the same for all Cinema versions for CentiLeo.

9. The other optional way to open Resource Editor is to click the "Search" icon in the very top right corner (under the close X button), and type "Resource Editor" there. In the opened window of resource editor select the language and the database "com.centileo.nodes.module"

10. The other language strings are stored in the folder:

Code
C:\Program Files\Maxon Cinema 4D R21\plugins\CentiLeoR21\res\strings_zh-CN

In reality this is not complex. But the message looks large
Maxon describes the launching of Resource editor with their documentation for programmers where you can see similar screenshots https://developers.maxon.net/docs/Cinema4DCPPSDK/html/page_handbook_node_implementati­on_nodespace.ht...

Select "Transparent background" option in render settings to make transparent image.
Actually it's a responsibility of Cinema 4D to save the image layers that renderer produces. Maybe PSD will get a separate Alpha pass? Actually PNG when saved has alpha, I think it can be extracted in AE. Currently I can't look into AE.

Quote
hu wrote: Quote Kirgman wrote: 好的，我对 Post Effects 设置的猜测是正确的。 将需要再次查看并调试，直到每个案例的 PV 和 IPR 中的图像匹配。 hi kirgman： 我点击在 IPR 中保存当前图像并将图像发送到 C4d 进行渲染。之前的后期效果设置没有效果。如何在最后渲染的图像中保存设置的后期效果设置？

Hi Hu and welcome here!
This is because, your Filter settings are enabled in Picture Viewer in addition to CentiLeo post effects. Disable Filter settings and use CentiLeo post effects and it will be the same in IPR and PV. Or disable CentiLeo post effects settings and change only Cinema PV Filter settings.
See the images in my experiment.
Write in English, at least with auto-translation

The link to sample is https://drive.google.com/file/d/188S8wvb097fdrAGZp3cqNorji6loOMm2/view?usp=sharing
It's in my first reply, read it again.

Quote
ssjenforcer wrote: When I used the shadow catcher for the material node and looked at the node editor, there was nothing there about shadow catcher. Is that normal? Shouldn't there be some node reference to it?

When you click to the node in the node editor you see the settings of this node in attribute manager as in this screen. See highlighted settings.

Quote
ssjenforcer wrote: Will it not work with simple lights at all, only when using an HDRi?

The HDR is needed to make a background for engine. If you don't need a background then additionally use HDR Sky setup + transparent background in render settings.
Everything is exposed in render settings.

Quote
ssjenforcer wrote: Also, I see that there are two types of centileo materials: centileo material and material [node] What is the difference? One only has material editor while the other has node editor. And the centileo material has 'matte' while the material [node] has shadow catcher. I tried both material types and neither give me shadows in the render.

Just material is the old version of CentiLeo materials that was the only option before Cenima R21. Since then Maxon has added node based materials support for 3rd party renderers and we have made the implementation and exposed it into the main menu instead of just materials. "Matte" and "Shadow Catcher" from both versions mean the same thing, we have just changed name in one place forgetting to change in another one.
You probably don't see shadows if you don't setup HDR lighting. With no any lighting it's black. Just learn from our sample.

Hi Peirato! Welcome to CentiLeo Thank you very much for your initiative! You are absolutelly great! Did you replaced English texts or added Chinese as an extra language version? Have you seen the node-based material settings text labels? Feel free to get my support with translation!

Hi RAin3D_ and welcome here! Please can you send me a scene file with textures to info@centileo.com using some file share service? I will investigate the problem and make it fixed.