Hi Chuck and welcome to CentiLeo forum!
Ramp node is needed to create colored output for black/white Input Texture. For example, you may attach some CentiLeo Noise shader to the "Input Texture" slot of Ramp and then create green, blue, red, yellow, etc knots in the Gradient field of Ramp. You may also add Random shader (uniformly distributed greyscale colors) to the Input Texture of Ramp and create colored knots of Gradient to determine how frequent is red, how frequent is blue, etc. in the variety of objects with attached Ramp + Random shader.
You may also add Fallof shader to the Input Texture of Ramp and make colored knots. This way there will be color variations depeding on the view angle.

Kirill

Hi Ikon Art! Welcome to CentiLeo!
There is a very outdated documentation in the download archive, but I think it's not needed.
Actually we will update the documentation after 0.60 release when we will get more speed, node-based GUI, more features (particles, attributes, improved displacement).

There are almost no technical render parameters to affect performance except clamping. Other things are automatic. We try to do it simple and make space only for creativity.

Some valuable info:
1) All the used centileo bitmaps construct caches with the names "*.cntx". At the first bitmap usage it takes some time to construct a cache and also disk space, but later after second launch bitmaps are loaded from caches immediatelly. Later will reduce the *.cntx file sizes. They can be removed manually when the work on scene is not needed anymore.
2) Supported GPUs are with CUDA compute capability 3.0 or more, with 3GB or more. More GPU memory is better of course. 8GB+ VRAM is excellent. Geometry is stored very efficiently, also for displacement, there is a lot of space before you meet out-of-core, which is also very efficient.

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.575 alpha (2019 March 30)
[cntlc4d] Fixed crash at Cinema 4D R20.059 launch

Fixed the issue for R20.059

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.573 alpha (2019 March 22)
[core] Fixed Windows 10 memory bug which could cause crashes in scenes with a lot of geometry and textures.

Thanks Daniel, I will dive into these things when will start converting 0.58 release for Max

Btw, the new CUDA version of NVIDIA that we use no longer supports GPUs of compute capability 2.0 and 2.1. This means that GTX 480, 580, 560ti and other similar devices are no longer supported. See the full list of devices per compute capability here https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus

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Thomas Jensen wrote: Centileo wether its the bridged r19 or the "legit" r20 release are not working on my r20...0.57 Dont know whats wrong but Cinema is not starting up.

Hi Thomas and welcome here! What are your computer specs?
If this is Windows, Nvidia GPU (with at least 3 GB or even 2 GB) then Cinema may not start if Graphics Drivers are outdated. Please try install new drivers and let me know your results.

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.572 alpha (2019 March 6)
[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).

I have fixed the bug with SSS and motion blur. Will upload today or tomorrow with some other recent bugfixes.

Hi Christopher! And welcome here!

Please, can you upload this file with SSS so I can test it and debug. Just solid light pink and dark pink shouldn't be there?
There shouldn't be anything special with SSS and motion blur. Maybe I have missed inserting time value to some function.
Btw, you can watch how motion blurred object lookd for every time if you change the shutter open/close range (in render settings) from 0..0.5 to the range like 0.3 and 0.3 (just immediate time moment).
There is some limitation for IPR and motion blur: IPR doesn't show more than 4 motion keys in a preview. But if you render from Picture Viewer (or IPR with FIN GEO mode) then you will be able to see all motion blur keys enabled in render settings.

Max ray bounces - limits the total bounces of light path travel in the scene (from camera to light).
Max diffuse bounces - limits bounces from surfaces with non-zero roughness. These 2 settings may be valuable for example when you limit the "Max diffuse bounces" but have a glass object with internal reflections and refractions and for this you increase "Max ray bounces" and get deeper render result and slower render only for this object but not for the rest.

Depth of Field is moving to camera. Focus distance is controlled from camera object. The rest things (like sensor width, blades) will land there too once I dig there again.

Caustics are currently blurred. However what you see around semi-transparent objects is not caustics but a fake transmission with forced IOR = 1 (for faster render in general case). Real precise caustics and dispercion will be addressed later when other production features will be implemented.

Metropolis is currently not used internally. But it was in the past. Even after all improvements that we did for it there are still so many problems for animation, motion blur, slower for everyday production scenes, many ray bounces and etc. We will continue to investigate though.
Anyway, the next 0.58 is about render time optimizations, so stay tuned

Hi Daniel! Thanks for reporting a bug. I know there are some scaling problems on 4K and I know some others too. Will fix this.
CentiLeo Light - is the right choice. It unites the other lights. But other (depr) lights are "deprecated". They will be removed, so they should be avoided.

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Daniel Westlund wrote: Hi Does it work with RTX cards yet? //Daniel

Hi Daniel, I heard some user tested CentiLeo with RTX 2080 and it was working faster than with older GPUs. But I haven't tested personally, still using 970 and 1070.
As for RTX rays acceleration hardware feature - not supported. At the current state of RTX ray acceleration feature - it may be not compatible with some current and future CentiLeo features.
Btw, I will update CentiLeo for Max at the next 0.58 release

Hi Carl! And welcome here!
One of my development setup is a bit worse, 32GB RAM and 3x 970GTX. It's rarely have sluggy perf in IPR.
What kind of scene do you have? Polycounts, textures? Do you use some physical simulators at the same time?
It can be the case if you run several programs that use GPU somehow and they cut GPU resources step by step. And then you enter CentiLeo and it takes some resources too. When there are too small resources it may have some problems. For example, when you are in IPR right-click on mouse and see what GPUs are actually running, what percent of total work each GPU is doing (number next to GPU name), and how the GPU memory is arranged (for textures/geometry and rays). Maybe a screenshot may give me some info.

One option to fix that is to go to Render Settings -> Tab Hardware Settings. There you may enable/disable the GPUs for your scene. And also you may enable/disable "low priority" mode. For example, try to disable the monitor GPU and leave all others for render. Or try to enable "low priority" for monitor GPU and disable "low priority" for all others.

Anyway, there is a big optimization ongoing work for the next 0.58 release. Our internal GPU kernels will become lightweight and faster. This should help a lot not only for general render speed but also for IPR responsiveness. So, stay tuned, in few months there will be an update

Change Log: cntlmax 0.553 alpha (2018 December 28)
[cntlmax] Added 3ds max 2019 support.
[cntlmax] Fixed crash bugs for animation rendering of objects with Greeble modifier.

Will update CentiLeo for 3ds Max on 0.58 release with new shaders and render speed optimizations.

Don't worry, I will fix the issue. It happend because I tried to fix some aritifacts with dispalement for 8-bit images where almost white values created displacemnt aliasing. That fix shoudn't be enabled for 16-bit images. Simple

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Aimar NL_21 wrote: it seems something wrong in Displacement .

and also try to multiply the bitmap in photoshop by value 0.9 or 0.95. It will lower all peaks and they will not be clamped here. Is it jpg or other 8 bit image?
you may increase the values later in a bitmap shader or by displacement height scale.

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Aimar NL_21 wrote: it seems something wrong in Displacement .

Hi Aimar, I probably guess what's the problem. Please, can you send me a bitmap for some tests? To info@centileo.com or here

CentiLeo 0.571: Fixed focus distance bug on camera object when CentiLeo camera tag is assigned.

Hi Ali, sorry for missed reply. I will update next time on 0.61. Scroll up to to see the reasons explained to Daniel. Now we need more speed and better instancing. That's an absolute must have.