You are right! I have tested from IPR, not from final
Will fix shortly

Hi Daniel, thanks!
1) Physical camera dof. Have you tested the most recent 0.593 version? I have made a test and both Target Distance of Custom Focus Distance are animated and CentiLeo accounts them correctly from 0 to 20 frame in attached file.
2) Lost half of animation frames. There was a problem but it was fixed in 0.593 http://centileo.com/news/138/centileo-for-3dsmax-0593/
Is this problem still there? I have just recorder it for the same file and all is fine.

As for other issues - they will be fixed, I know they are very much needed. But currently is too busy with complex out-of-core instancing

Hi vblackrender., I still haven't made more tools for cache files but there is some more detailed info in new manual about these cache files here + the larger picture about entire system.

Hi remi! How did you make a background on 004-cntl.jpg ? Is that rendered or just a texture?

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.593 alpha (2020 May 29)
- up to 2x less noise for some HDR images in interiors
- more stable noise structure for low sample count
- Cinema S22 support (for S22.016+ builds)
- Fixed const color profile interpretation of materials

Hi vblackrender., I have improved the noise reductions for HDR such as this one! 2x less noise in the same time! No iteration time increase. Other HDRs that were already good dont' become worse with this modification.
May I post the "before/after" image with this your scene on the news page related to the next 0.593 fix-release? Will also insert the link to your Behance

It can be a great addition, it's in the plans for the time of OptiX denoiser integration. I haven't read all the details yet, but as far as I know such a thing works for early samples. So, it can improve the visual noise impression for the 1spp, 4spp, 64spp. Just for low sample count. For high spp final frames it doesn't make any advantage (if I remember correctly).
But still it can be usefull for immeiate IPR previews + OptiX denoiser. People reported it improves denoiser for low spp.

Btw there is more recent achievment by Eric Heitz https://eheitzresearch.wordpress.com/762-2/
Jacco Bikker did it for his Lighthouse 2 path tracer project (real-time): https://twitter.com/j_bikker

Cycles did that tech you cited btw. But I don't remember how it worked for them in practice.

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vblackrender. wrote: +100kb is nothing

when I think about an idea of making HDR per material it doesn't look like nothing But we will see, maybe some separate Sky HDR materials types could be done (a few per scene) and some normal surface materials can link to them.
At the moment 6 Sky HDR objects are possible. You may create them and assign different .hdr/.exr files and make on/off for Camera, Diffuse, Reflection, SSS, Shadow Catcher, Transmission, Translucent. For example som Sky object Environment tag has only Camera channel = 1, others are zero. The second Sky object has only Diffuse = 1 and others zero. And this way you may assign different lighting to diffrernt channels.

I remember it appeared even few years ago http://centileo.com/forum/messages/forum19/message569/111-centileo-for-cinema-4d-0483-available-mult...
In my constant tests I randomly see the problem probably once per 2 weeks in different situations. After re-run it dissapears

vblackrender., hi! I know this problem. It appears randomly and in different places. Basically some geometry small part is removed here and there. There is a problem to find solution because the bug changes positions and not always reproduced in the same conditions.
I hope that the problem will dissapear when the geometry engine (compilation + ray intersection) will be improved. Maybe some of geo compression scheme is the reason. But we need time to fix that.

Hi purush thaman, welcome here! I know it's a problem without stadard AOVs. They are important and will be implemented, not a big deal. But currently very busy with other tasks, like multi-instances, particles and bugfixes. Let's move to a new AOV titled topic without mixing with an old one?

Research has shown that HDR resoultion issues were not issues in that case. But! There are 4 drawn light sources in your HDR. You may see them if move the camera outside the window.
1 of lights reaches the room through the window. Another one partially reaches the room. But 2 light sources of HDR image don't reach the room at all because they are blocked by top wall. But they are bright and grab the samples computations + add 2x more noise because return no any result. So that's why so noisy. Octane is even more noisy in this scene (a lot).
I see 2 ways to fix this:
1) to erase not-needed lights from HDR image by user.
2) wait for some my adaptivity fix which may help and will cost probably +100Kb of memory consuption + tests/debugging or something like that

However HDR resolution issue appear in another case with very narrow bright light making very hard shadow. It's almost fixed. That problem gave 100x more noise than normal situation.

Hi vblackrender.,
At the moment I am working on improving HDR sampling with that your scene. Describe it in your topic.

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.592 alpha (2020 May 12) - currently for all R16-R21
- Fixed broken Absorption property
- Fixed bug for lost frames during animation rendering in PV
- Fixed bug with wrong geometry translation when IPR doesn’t account for some deformers (such as Surface Deformer and few others)
- Fixed few bugs which caused some crashes.

I have uploaded this fix. Sorry for some delay, there were a few annoying technical problems there. Now continue with other fixes, especially the one with HDR sampling.

One more tomorrow!

If you switch-off "Static noise" in render settings the noise seed pattern will be different from frame to frame. Such property can be needed in animation denoisers.
How did you make it working with black 1/2 frames?

There should be no flickering, it uses no caches. Flickering may appear in cases of caches (especially irradiance cache with some large gather radius).

Maybe I was a bit not clear deep night. It seems to be that not only the resolution of HDR is important (lowres or highres), but the area of light vs background and intensity of that light. If HDR is high res, has small area of light with very high intensity - there can be a problem. But will need to investigate more. Probably, some of my past HDR optimizations have failed and I need to spend more memory for them or just make them adaptive.

Btw, it lags on my PC too! Very slightly. The cooling system works too intensively and with the same rythm.

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vblackrender. wrote: Here we go with the next test. I played with the "scratches" shader. I am amazed of this shader. So easy to give every material the little extra for more realism!

Personally, I don't like our scratches already. Need to have bend property and better distribution of their length (they are too similar). So, improvements are expected there once I know how to do them
At the same time I like Flakes a lot more. They can be used as masks for multi-material stacking and combine several reflection shaders. Such manipulations are much easier in Node Editor of course.

vblackrender., thanks for scene!
there are 2 problems with interior:
1) Post-process exposure 6.7 - it's too hard for rendering sample to operate on almost black lighting and then compensate it in post. Numerical imprecision and other things have more influence at this scale. It's better to operate on exposure at values close to 0 or 1, 2. Don't forget to make Expected Exposure in render settings to be similar to the one in Post.
What I did is to decrease Post Exposure, Increase HDR multiplier and increase the Clamp Direct/Indect values to 20. It's less noisy, but also has different contrast. So need to improve precision in future.
2) Some problems with sampling of your HDR. I don't know yet, but maybe the sampable resolution that we consruct is too low, need to see and not make +1 user setting. Actually I have tested another HDR (from the FB post scene). And it has much less noise. However, it's also bright, contrast (narrow sun), but it's lowres. Lowres/highres of original HDR shouldn't be influential, but the resolution of sampable HDR is.

Dark corners in 2 fixed versions have less noise as I was looking for. So I am calm for that CentiLeo special GI sampling algo. Just need to improve HDR initial procession