Hello everyone!

We now release an update CentiLeo 0.57 for Cinema 4D R16-R20. The new release adds flexible UVW Projection, Transform and Distortion shader nodes in the manner of Cinema R20. UVW nodes add a lot of flexibility in combination with Bitmaps. Also added easy to setu[ Flakes and Scratches shader nodes for procedural imperfections. Improved Random and Triplanar shaders. Added other usefull shaders like Patterns, Layer, Ramp, Curve Map, Remap, Wire, Side. The other shader nodes are also improved.
We will work on the render speed optimizations for the next release.

Please, test it and share your opinion!
Best regards,
Kirgman

Download link (site registration required): http://centileo.com/download/

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.575 alpha (2019 March 30)
[cntlc4d] Fixed crash at Cinema 4D R20.059 launch for some other events. The older Cinema R20 builds don’t need this fix.

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.574 alpha (2019 March 28)
[cntlc4d] Fixed crash at Cinema 4D R20.059 launch (just updated to the modified C4D SDK). The older Cinema R20 builds don’t need this fix.

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.
[note] A user can remove texture cache files *.mctx because in new version the texture caches of other bugfixed format with names *.cntx will be auto-generated.

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).

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.571 alpha (2018 December 20)
[cntlc4d] Fixed focus distance bug on camera object when CentiLeo camera tag is assigned.

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.570 alpha (2018 December 19)
[core] New UVW Projection node supporting up to 4 UVW tags (mesh uv), spherical, cylindrical, cubic, flat, flat side, spatial and XYZ texture mapping coordinates. Texture coordinate system can be further manipulated (offset, scale, rotation) in the same way as Coordinates Tab of Texture Tag or UVW Projection node of Cinema R20. Offset, scale and rotation can be textured. Procedural texture coordinates are currently determined in the Texture Tag space (related to the object where it is assigned).
[core] New UVW Transform node which performs further manipulations on projected texture coordinates in the same way as the similar node of Cinema R20. 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] 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 Ramp node which can produce different colors based on the grayscale Input Map values and configuration of the Gradient knots. Up to 30 Gradient Knot values can be textured to produce flexible customization for the output.
[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] Fixed some rare issues when black and white bump map and normal map are combined.
[core] Added support for different Anisotropy tangents for Reflection1 and Reflection2. Also added improved cylindrical option for procedural anisotropy tangent.
[cntlc4d] Improved GUI for materials and shaders. E.g. the edit button doesn’t jump down when the shader is unrolled.
[cntlc4d] The Coordinates Tab and projection types of Texture Tag are supported (except of camera based projections).
[cntlc4d] CentiLeo Bitmaps and Environment maps are now collected correctly when the project is saved with the assets.
[cntlc4d] Fixed cloner object parsing issues which produced wrong scenes for CentiLeo.
[cntlc4d] Scene parsing now accounts for Cinema layer visibility changes.
[cntlc4d] Bitmap reset cache button is back.

Known issues to be solved
- May not initialize if AMD GPU is in your computer together with NVIDIA GPU.
- Very limited scene converter tool from Cinema 4D native materials (only diffuse color and texture are converted and translated if assigned to the object)
- May not support non-latin texture paths.

Important note
We are currently using JUCE library (https://juce.com/) for IPR GUI under Personal license (which is free) for initial testing purpose. In IPR window it will show in the right bottom corner a splash screen for the first start and it dissapears in few sec. It may also connect to Google Analytics to collect end-user stats. Juce guys claim this is nothing bad but stats collection so they know who is using them. However, the plugin works perfectly without any Internet connection.
If everything works well on main technical side then we will buy the full license of JUCE and get rid of these small issues.

Hi Daniel, some quick news:
There will be centileo 0.57 for Cinema with many (10+) new shaders/textures in around 2 weeks (maybe less). Another super important release 0.58 will come at around the beginning of January. And also for Cinema only.
As for CentiLeo to 3ds Max plugin then the next update will be 0.61 in around half a year since now. After 0.61 both plugin updates (for c4d and max) will come together at the same time. And it will be easier to maintain them. The reason is that I want to develop core CentiLeo features (shaders, procedurals, optimizations) as fast as possible while 3ds max GUI writting is long (but Cinema's is easy and requires almost no time).
0.61 will contain many standard shaders/textures (procedural mappings and noises), attributes support (per vertex, per instance), further improved displacement mapping, geometry scattering, true massive instancing (for particles and etc), better color output (and tonemapping) and faster. It will be a very cool and usable rendering arsenal, better than others.

Do you mean animated DoF focus? Right now it works statically but because of bug dousn't record param values on animation. Will fix that by next release together with other big improvements.

bump + blend in 0.55 no problem when mixed.
However it looks better in 0.56 for C4D

Well, the hair shouldn't work. We don't yet have spline intersection support. It was just the triangulation of hairs by 3ds max that CentiLeo is ordering. There should be considerably more efforts to make the spline rendering right and that would be cool and much more efficient than triangles.
Will test the bump + blend map and get back to you.

Hi Harry, welcome here! Ok, will do that in the future, but not just very soon. Need to work on shaders and some optimizations

Hello everyone!

We now reelease an update CentiLeo 0.56 for Cinema 4D R16-R20. This time it improves the light sources, complex geometry shapes for light sources are allowed and many light sources are working much faster now and bugs are also fixes. On next release we will add more shader nodes.

Please, test it and share your opinion!
Best regards,
Kirgman

Download link (site registration required): http://centileo.com/forum/forum18/152-download-link-centileo-for-cinema-4d-v0560-alpha

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.560 alpha (2018 September 6)
[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. Also bugfixed many issues in this area.
[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 problems with liquids inside glass in some modes.
[core] Extended CentiLeo Noise shaders with more noise types like Voronoi, Ronk, Ridged Multi-Fractal, etc.
[core] Faster bitmap cache generator (2x faster).
[core] Added real distance units for CentiLeo materials and light sources where it makes sense (e.g. displacement height, SSS scale, dirt shader max distance and etc.).
[core] Light sources may change the brightness on the surfaces for old scenes due to the distance units integration and some other calibration. Need to adapt for it.
[cntlc4d] Added support for Cinema 4D R20.

Known issues to be solved
- May not initialize if AMD GPU is in your computer together with NVIDIA GPU.
- Very limited scene converter tool from Cinema 4D native materials (only diffuse color and texture are converted and translated if assigned to the object)
- May not support non-latin texture paths.

Important note
We are currently using JUCE library (https://juce.com/) for IPR GUI under Personal license (which is free) for initial testing purpose. In IPR window it will show in the right bottom corner a splash screen for the first start and it dissapears in few sec. It may also connect to Google Analytics to collect end-user stats. Juce guys claim this is nothing bad but stats collection so they know who is using them. However, the plugin works perfectly without any Internet connection.
If everything works well on main technical side then we will buy the full license of JUCE and get rid of these small issues.

Hi Daniel, any map is usable in the bump map. Color correction however corrects the color info in certain range. But internal bump data can have negative numbers and large values which are color corrected in a wrong way. At least avoid using clamp inside color correct node or extend the limits of clamp.
I have changed the bump internals completelly in the new version. And need to make some bump correction node related to this issue

Hi Angelo, this will be available in CentiLeo 0.62 together with other instancing/scattering improvements. In several months

0.552 update: Improved displacement precision in pixel adaptive mode for animated walkthrough.
In the past there were subtle waves on high-frequency displacement surfaces during animated walktrhough even when Edge size is 0.5 pixels (and Adapt to pixels ON). Now this artifact is removed for Edge size equal to 0.5 pixels. But still need to improve things for Edge size = 1 pixels with a more sophisticated aproach.

Btw, there was no wave problem during any animation for Edge size in world units (with pixel adaptation disabled). However, if tesselated in this mode there could be more polygon data generated than for adaptive pixel mode.

0.552 update: Improved displacement precision in pixel adaptive mode for animated walkthrough.
In the past there were subtle waves on high-frequency displacement surfaces during animated walktrhough even when Edge size is 0.5 pixels (and Adapt to pixels ON). Now this artifact is removed for Edge size equal to 0.5 pixels. But still need to improve things for Edge size = 1 pixels with a more sophisticated aproach.

Btw, there was no wave problem during any animation for Edge size in world units (with pixel adaptation disabled). However, if tesselated in this mode there could be more polygon data generated than for adaptive pixel mode.

bump

The issue is fixed in 0.55!

Hello everyone!
We release CentiLeo 0.55 for 3ds Max with new powerfull displacement mapping engine too!
As said in C4D 055 thread there were many R&D tasks that should be solved to make it working normally.
Our Displacement mapping tech is based on pre-tesselation of geometry before rendering. But it's fast and has good memory economy.
This pre-tesselation approach helps to use arbitrarty shading networks now. And it will allow to extend it to vector displacement mapping in the future.
Currently CentiLeo displacement mapped objects are tesselated very-very quickly and render very fast. Faster than competitor pre-tesselation methods. Potentially hundreds million unique triangles can be handled very efficiently if needed for very high resolution.

See this changelog to get the idea how new feature works. We now turn attention to mesh lights and many new shader nodes.

Please, test it and share your opinion!
Best regards,
Kirgman

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

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.

Change Log: cntlmax 0.552 alpha (2018 June 16)
[core] Improved displacement precision in pixel adaptive mode (subtle waves in animation are removed).

Change Log: cntlmax 0.551 alpha (2018 June 12)
[core] Displacement mapping functionality based on explicit geometry pre-tesselation with very efficient memory usage, fast tesselation and fast rendering.
E.g. with GTX 1070-1080 Ti it’s possible to generate and render 1-2 billion unique micropolygons (and more with instancing) – of course if you have at least 32GB of usual RAM.
[core] Displacement mapping supports the whole shader network including current and future procedural shaders/texture mappings except of falloff and other view dependent things.
[core] Displacement mapping can be combined without any issues with deformation motion blur (applied to base geometry, not to displacement height params).
[core] Displacement mapping parameters are controlled through menu of CentiLeo Material that is applied to geometry object.
[core] CentiLeo IPR mode doesn’t retesselate and displace the objects automatically while moving the camera and/or objects. We made it manual, so the user should click the button “Tess” in IPR window to retesselate and displace all objects of the scene with new parameters or click button “Tesselate” in material menu to retesselate only those objects where material is applied.
[core] Option of Autobump mapping as a supplemental tool for Displacement.
[core] Support for 16/32 bit bitmaps for Displacement.
[core] Added rotation and filter radius params to CentiLeo Bitmap.
[core] Added more settings to CentiLeo Noise shader.
[core] Minimum required GPU memory is bumped to 1280MB. This minimum memory is necessary for CentiLeo to operate. Sometimes a 2GB GPU in an overloaded system may have less available memory after memory reductions by OS and 3D app.
[core] Fixed various rare visual bugs, e.g. a bug that made visible artifacts at low FOV.
[drawbacks] Our main work on Displacement mapping still has some drawbacks:
- no yet support for Vector Displacement Mapping (only scalar one);
- divorced surface when the vertex has several different normals (e.g. a corner of a cube);
- it doesn’t like very much when base geometry already has too dense polygon tesselation that should be displaced (there is some more memory overhead);
- no yet Dicing Camera parameter;
These issues will be solved after a series of other feature releases.

Important note
We are currently using JUCE library (https://juce.com/) for IPR GUI under Personal license (which is free) for initial testing purpose. In IPR window it will show in the right bottom corner a splash screen for the first start and it dissapears in few sec. It may also connect to Google Analytics to collect end-user stats. Juce guys claim this is nothing bad but stats collection so they know who is using them. However, the plugin works perfectly without any Internet connection.
If everything works well on main technical side then we will buy the full license of JUCE and get rid of these small issues.

GPU Drivers
Please, install modern NVIDIA display drivers. E.g. at least 372.70 or one of the newest.

Adjust GPU Rendering Low-priority settings
Can be found in CentiLeo Renderer Settings -> Hardware Settings.
Low-priority flags are ON by default in IPR mode for ALL GPUs. For fluent work in IPR mode it’s HIGHLY RECOMMENDED to keep enabled “low-priority” setting for DISPLAY GPU and switch if OFF for other render GPUs which are not connected to the monitor. Low-priority option is useful for display GPU because it is used to display the elements and models of 3D Viewport and OS.
If you have many GPUs in one computer then Display GPU can be excluded from IPR render to have less competition between Viewport and CentiLeo for Display GPU, this can improve the system feedback overall.

Displaced version is slower than without it just because it has more polygons. More polygons for same scene produce slightly slower rendering. But if you model everything with same polycounts the will be same situation

Hello everyone!
We can finally release an update CentiLeo 0.55 for Cinema 4D with new displacement mapping engine. There work was so long because there was a lot of R&D and new algorithms were created to make DM efficient.
We have opted to make DM based on geometry pre-tesselation because we want it to support arbitrary shader networks as input and to make vector displacements too. Both these things are impossible without pre-tesselation. And with this fact many problems may happen like huge poly-counts, screen adaptivity artifacts, not so fast tesselations and renderings. However, we have solved many of these. Btw, there are still some drawbacks and vector displacements are not yet added, but we will fix that at later stage.
See this changelog to get the idea how new feature works. We now turn attention to mesh lights and many new shader nodes.

Please, test it and share your opinion!
Best regards,
Kirgman

Download link (site registration required): http://centileo.com/forum/forum18/148-download-link-centileo-for-cinema-4d-v0550-alpha

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.552 alpha (2018 June 16)
[core] Improved displacement precision in pixel adaptive mode (subtle waves in animation are removed).

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.551 alpha (2018 June 12)
[core] Added overall displace scale and waterlevel parameters.
[cntlc4d] Fixed wrong texture rotation displayed in the viewport.
[cntlc4d] Fixed GPU priority toggling in IPR.
[cntlc4d] Focus distance data from CentiLeo camera tag is automatically moved to corresponding field of the camera object.

Change Log: cntlc4d 0.550 alpha (2018 June 7)
[core] Displacement mapping functionality based on explicit geometry pre-tesselation with very efficient memory usage, fast tesselation and fast rendering.
E.g. with GTX 1070-1080 Ti it’s possible to generate and render 1-2 billion unique micropolygons (and more with instancing) – of course if you have at least 32GB of usual RAM.
[core] Displacement mapping supports the whole shader network including current and future procedural shaders/texture mappings except of falloff and other view dependent things.
[core] Displacement mapping can be combined without any issues with deformation motion blur (applied to base geometry, not to displacement height params).
[core] Displacement mapping parameters are controlled through menu of CentiLeo Material that is applied to geometry object.
[core] CentiLeo IPR mode doesn’t retesselate and displace the objects automatically while moving the camera and/or objects. We made it manual, so the user should click the button “Tess” in IPR window to retesselate and displace all objects of the scene with new parameters or click button “Tesselate” in material menu to retesselate only those objects where material is applied.
[core] Displacement Alpha map is used as the mask of displacement values of the current material which can be useful when several materials are stacked as layers in Cinema 4D.
[core] Option of Autobump mapping as a supplemental tool for Displacement.
[core] Added support of 16/32 bit bitmaps for Displacement.
[core] Added rotation and filter radius params to CentiLeo Bitmap.
[core] Added more settings to CentiLeo Noise shader.
[core] Minimum required GPU memory is bumped to 1280MB. This minimum memory is necessary for CentiLeo to operate. Sometimes a 2GB GPU in an overloaded system may have less available memory after memory reductions by OS and 3D app.
[cntlc4d] CentiLeo camera Depth of Field now listens for native C4D camera focus distance property with proper updates when changed from C4D Editor or CentiLeo IPR.
[cntlc4d] Fixed various rare visual bugs, e.g. a bug that made visible artifacts at low FOV.
[drawbacks] Our main work on Displacement mapping still has some drawbacks:
- no yet support for Vector Displacement Mapping (only scalar one);
- divorced surface when the vertex has several different normals (e.g. a corner of a cube);
- it doesn’t like very much when base geometry already has too dense polygon tesselation that should be displaced (there is some more memory overhead);
- no yet Dicing Camera parameter;
These issues will be solved after a series of other feature releases.

Known issues to be solved
- May not initialize if AMD GPU is in your computer together with NVIDIA GPU.
- Very limited scene converter tool from Cinema 4D native materials (only diffuse color and texture are converted and translated if assigned to the object)
- May not support non-latin texture paths.

Important note
We are currently using JUCE library (https://juce.com/) for IPR GUI under Personal license (which is free) for initial testing purpose. In IPR window it will show in the right bottom corner a splash screen for the first start and it dissapears in few sec. It may also connect to Google Analytics to collect end-user stats. Juce guys claim this is nothing bad but stats collection so they know who is using them. However, the plugin works perfectly without any Internet connection.
If everything works well on main technical side then we will buy the full license of JUCE and get rid of these small issues.

Hi Egor! Welcome on our forum! You are right, we need to update the site content better.
But there was no stop in development because this time we digged too deep in displacement tech internal things. There will be a new release 0.55 in few days. When few other important releases will be done we will be more active on the web.

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p.s.: can't get here on site without VPN....

The problem is that our website is blocked as a consequence of Russia blocking the Telegram servers. However we did nothing wrong. Seems that we need to move from DigitalOcean to somewhere else.

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Daniel Westlund wrote: Thanks! And looking forward to your next release! //Daniel

Yesterday I have won a battle for rendering speed of compressed displacement. The approach was based on pre-tesselation like Arnold, Redshift (not like Octane) because we need to support any kind of combinations of shaders and uv. It was all good, but after all adaptive polygon reductions the poly counts for high quality were still pretty high. And then all of this data was compressed very much. However, render speed dropped 30-50% compared to non-compression. For some weeks there were many attempts to fix that and it's fixed now! No speed lost Now it tesselates quickly, memory is very efficient and renders fast. Now need to fix small things, and this can be done much quicker.

I have detected the issue. And strange thing it goes away when reduce Diffuse roughness or change Reflection roughness, IOR. Will dig, there is something with material evaluation.