Juan, hi! Let's fix the artifact! E.g. you may look how the UV mapping works if you plug the cntlUVProjection node to diffuse slot of CentiLeo material. In cntlUVProjection you should select the same mapping type as the in the Bitmap which causes the problem. And there we will see what's going on.

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Juan Carlos Gutiérrez wrote: Thank you for replying, where can I report bugs, crashes and improvements?

I think it's better to post these things as new topics (or all in one your topic) in this forum. I track it every day
Will soon start publishing the documentation online with few articles, will begin from materials and shaders.

Hi Juan, there seems to be a problem (probably with UV or XYZ mapping). Does it happen when you apply a bump map? Can you please send me a file for test and debug to info@centileo.com? Appart from artifact I like it

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Juan Carlos Gutiérrez wrote: Appleseed has random walk implemented, you might want to take a look on their code.

Hello Juan! Welcome here and thanks for advice! I know this. The theory and potential samples are known, but the actual port in our software environment can be very-very different. Anyway still need to improve other things before diving into this topic.

Hi remi bouffort, to make a normal map you can make CentiLeo bitmap shader for the Bump slot of CentiLeo material. Then in CentiLeo Bitmap you select the normal map file location and enable the "Is Normal Map" checkbox. That's all. There are also other flags that flip the normal map r/g/b to adapt for various normal map formats.
Also this way of doing a normal map allows additional combinations with greyscale bump maps.

Change Log: cntlmax 0.583 alpha (2019 December 6)
[cntlmax] Fixed broken GUI layout for increased windows font size and high resolution monitors.

Hi remi, sure, do it! I hope this month we will update the documentation and make it online (at least partially) so the people will better understand how good we are before downloading

Hi remi! Good start! Btw, you can make colored flakes if you connect flake shader (with greyscale ids) to the Ramp (to input map) or Random shader (to seed map).

Hi remi bouffort, and welcome to our forum! Thanks! I try to test as much as can remember but there are still several known bugs there. As for the nodal GUI - it's in development currently

Hi a1cat cato, a lot nicer!
This is diffusion based SSS (but ray traced). It's pretty fast, but not precise on the small details because may them.
As for usability - it's the same as in Arnold or Reshift (tested a year ago). Their documentation may apply for us too.
3 layers which are mixed together. For example to make white you may create one red, another green and another blue. And they will be combined to white. Another way is to make all layers white and it will be the same. To make some color effect from under surface you can make some red channel with larger radius.
There is more precise method (but a bit slower/noiser) - Random Walk SSS, we haven't yet implemented it, but it's in the TODO list.
Will describe such things in manual.

Btw I tried to fix the bug with IPR - final render conflict. But hasn't reproduced it quickly and released with other fixes. For me the pauses, launches of final render haven't produced the crashes. Note that final render will not start until IPR is closed because we want full resources in either case.
But I will test more on Win10 (because I usually do tests in Win7) and hope to cactch the problem.

Good image! I like them with DoF. Next step is to add SSS for candles. And small fire

Hi a1cat cato, you can directly drag & drop your images from your computer to the reply form of this forum and it will be attached. Just below the text edit box there is an area with "Upload images" title.
As for IPR autofocus tool - I will fix it for the next bugfixing update. Btw, you may look into Max Physical camera options, target distance, etc. Soon it will be supported almost completely, Mostly I like tilt options of it.

Change Log: cntlmax 0.582 alpha (2019 November 29)
[cntlmax] Added Ramp shader that colorizes the input b/w texture with other colors. The nodes of our ramp shader can be textured.
[cntlmax] Fixed scene units representation in all CentiLeo materials, shaders and lights.
[cntlmax] Focus distance in render settings can be animated.
[cntlmax] Initial 3ds Max Physical camera support (DOF focus distance, aperture size, bokeh). Next will add support for other things of Physical camera.

Hi Ali, I currently don't have fresh Corona for tests. Will investigate later. Currenly expect that there is nothing we can do with this. Corona was already known in the past to have influence on our crashes when we used wxWidgets. CentiLeo coexists with other GPU renderers in Max or Cinema. Sometimes both renderer IPRs are opened (in Cinema).

Better tell me about the noisy scenes. If you light with HDR then use portals! They become so much better in latest release.

Hi Ali Kavyani, thanks for bugrep!

Mix shader is now Layer shader which is more powerfull multi-layer thing. In default mode it behaves like old Mix shader.

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Ali Kavyani wrote: Good progress in noiseless renders but after 32 Iteration a simple interior renders appearances very nois

Please show me example picture and tell what light sources, portals and HDRs are there.

Will look at denoisers after couple of other optimizations.
No to Light Cache! Not because of bias, but because of complexity of parameters.

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Ali Kavyani wrote: Ability to add emissive objects in blend light passes

AOVs will be massively updated in a few months.

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Ali Kavyani wrote: I noticed after installing Centileo, Corona render cannot load (MAX 2020)

It looks very strange we have no any shared things with Corona unlike in some past where we both used wxWidgets library. Now we don't use it. Will look again. Windows 10?

Hi, a1cat cato! Which bug? Tell me. Maybe I could describe things better in documentation. Right now integrating Ramp GUI control into the shader and PhysicalCamera to cntlmax. A few days.

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.581 alpha (2019 November 21)
[core] Fixed bug with multiple lights sampling. Now scenes with many lights have much lower noise than 0.580.
[core] Fixed rendering artifacts in case of rendering out-of-core geometry with near/far clipped camera.
[core] Fixed a couple of other minor issues/artifacts.

a1cat cato, thanks for bugreport! Looking into that. There is a good collection already of such small little bugs

Some comparison with the previous version:
1280x720, one GTX1070, 4 iterations (256 samples), some darky interior with 4 lights, HDR and 3 portals.
CentiLeo 0.55 - 328 seconds
CentiLeo 0.58 - 119 seconds and less noise

Hello everyone!

Finally we are releasing the 0.58 update of CentiLeo for 3ds Max 2014-2020. We appology for not updating so long, as we have radically changed the architecture to reduce the noise, improve speed and flexibility. It was a complex atomic work. The current release unites 0.56, 57 and 58 updates we had for CentiLeo +Cinema 4D plugin.
However, we have made great impovements, see the changelog and download for tests.

Download link: http://centileo.com/download/

Change Log: cntlmax 0.586 alpha (2020 January 30)
[cntlmax] Fixed problems when 3ds Max UI scheme is saved
[cntlmax] Fixed some mesh normal artifacts in rare cases

Change Log: cntlmax 0.585 alpha (2020 January 29)
[core] 5-10% rendering speedup
[core] Fixed shadow catcher weights in case of many light sources (makes shadows of different intensity per light source on the Matte/Shadow Catcher object).
[core] Fixed shadow artifacts in case of very small area lights.
[core] Bitmap file paths now support Unicode strings (not just English).
[core] Fixed camera Auto Focus in IPR ([AF] button).
[core] CentiLeo updated to CUDA 10.2.
Attention! Must Upgrade to:
- Latest NVIDIA Display Drivers: Game Ready Driver 441.87 or Studio Driver 441.66 (slightly faster).

Change Log: cntlmax 0.584 alpha (2019 December 31)
[core] Fixed z-fighting render artifacts for coplanar polygons in the scene, precision is improved.
[core] Fixed few rare crash-bugs.
[cntlmax] Installation instructions are changed a bit, read them again!

Change Log: cntlmax 0.583 alpha (2019 December 6)
[cntlmax] Fixed broken GUI layout for increased windows font size and high resolution monitors.

Change Log: cntlmax 0.582 alpha (2019 November 29)
[cntlmax] Added Ramp shader that colorizes the input b/w texture with other colors. The nodes of our ramp shader can be textured.
[cntlmax] Fixed scene units representation in all CentiLeo materials, shaders and lights.
[cntlmax] Focus distance in render settings can be animated.
[cntlmax] Initial 3ds Max Physical camera support (DOF focus distance, aperture size, bokeh). Next will add support for other things of Physical camera.

Change Log: cntlmax 0.581 alpha (2019 November 18)
Speedup
[core] Rendering speedup from 2x to up to 10x:
-Render iterations are around 2x faster almost always (base speedup);
-Render iterations become smarter and reduce the noise better for global illumination, in some cases it is required 2-4x less iterations to get same noise level as before. These improvements are best visible for interiors and night scenes especially for regions with dominated global illumination and lack of direct lighting.
-Mesh lights with complex shapes (more than few polygons) generate 3-4x less noise than before.
-The new algorithm should be always better and more robust than the previous one (less noise per iteration and faster iteration time).
-And there is no cache, no blur, no aditional settings, no additional memory consumption

Shader improvements
[core] New UVW Projection node supporting up to 4 UV mesh channels, spherical, cylindrical, cubic, flat, flat side, spatial and XYZ texture mapping coordinates. Texture coordinate system can be further manipulated (offset, scale, rotation) in the similar way to UVW Map modifier of 3ds Max. Offset, scale and rotation can be textured. Procedural texture coordinates are currently based on the object instances where material is assigned.
[core] New UVW Transform node which performs further manipulations on texture coordinates (UVW Projection can be an input for UVW Transform). Supported manipulations are offset, scale, rotation, pivot, rand offset, repetitions - these parameters can be textured.
[core] Rand offset of UVW Transform generates random texture coordinate offsets inside each tile (useful to break repeating patterns of the tiled bitmaps).
[core] Decals or labels can be easily done using Decal checkbox in UVW Transform node connected to the Bitmap where the color of non-decal area is specified by “out of UVW” parameter.
[core] New UVW Distortion node which manipulates the input projected texture coordinates based on distortion scale and amount. Both parameters can be textured.
[core] Triplanar shader node now supports the input for UVW Projection which can specify the orientation of 3 planar projections.
[core] Bitmap node now supports crop, triplanar projection and custom UVW coordinates.
[core] Noise node now supports Voronoi F1, F2, F3, F4 and F2-F1 patterns. Also added Woody and Cell noise types. Added option for Noise output quantization.
[core] Extended CentiLeo Noise shaders with more noise types like Voronoi, Ronk, Ridged Multi-Fractal, etc.
[core] New Pattern node supporting few different wave patterns and checker.
[core] New procedural Scratches node which can easily add random scratch imperfections to material bump maps.
[core] Improved Random shader node with new option “Randomize by Object parts”. This option generates random output colors for the different parts for the single object. The object part is a region without polygon connections to other object parts.
[core] New procedural Flakes node which can easily add random metallic flakes to materials. This node may produce bump map if attached to Bump parameter. It can produce colored flakes too if the Flakes node is connected to the colored Ramp node and the Flakes Output mode is Flake IDs (flake ids produces random grayscale flakes).
[core] New Layer shader node which can combine up to 7 layers using different mixing modes (like Photoshop) where each layer has a color and mask.
[core] New Curve Map node which can change the values of Input Map to the different output based on the curve knots configuration.
[core] New Remap node which can change each channel of the Input Map from one range of values to the other range of values using the linear scaling.
[core] New Surface Wire node which highlights the edges of object triangles.
[core] New Surface Side node which helps making different output for Front/Back surface sides.
[core] Added support for different Anisotropy tangents for Reflection1 and Reflection2. Also added improved cylindrical option for procedural anisotropy tangent.
[core] Bump mapping code totally changed (it also changes the look and scale of bump on older scenes). It has higher quality now and better combination with Normal Maps. Normal Maps now have all these flip R/G/B options.
[core] Fixed some rare issues when black and white bump map and normal map are combined.
[core] Fixed some problems with liquids inside glass in some modes.
[core] Faster bitmap cache generator (2x faster).

Mesh Lights and Multi-lights
[core] Mesh Lights support. This is implemented with an additional Emission property of CentiLeo material. Supports arbitrary (even out-of-core) geometry shapes for the light sources.
[core] Adaptive Multi Lights 10 times faster rendering for glossy reflection surfaces (faster rendering when there are a lot of light sources and glossy materials). Also bugfixed many issues in this area.

Bugfixes
[core] Fixed Windows 10 memory bug which could cause crashes in scenes with a lot of geometry and textures.
[core] Fixed artifact bug when SSS doesn’t follow motion blur.
[core] Fixed wrong clamping for 16+ bit bitmaps when used for displacement.
[core] Fixed some triplanar mapping artifacts.
[core] Fixed wrong bump mapping over displacement mapping (when bump and displace maps are different).

Known issues to be solved (temporarily broken features)
-Dirt shader;
-Absorption property of material;
-Directional/infinite light source;
-Adaptive noise-based image rendering (where pixels are no longer rendered when specified noise level is reached).
-May not initialize if AMD GPU is in your computer together with NVIDIA GPU.
-Very limited scene converter tool (Multi Sub-Obj Material, 3ds Max Bitmap, only diffuse color and diffuse texture of material are converted to CentiLeo)

Please, test it on you setup and share your renders!
Best regards,
Kirill