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.

Hi Daniel, thanks for bugreport. I will download and see what is going on there.

Btw, I am still fighting with displacement mapping. There was a need to imrpove render times after memory optimisation. Solving it is almost ready. Hope that problems go away.

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Alex Comtur wrote: How to make light1 transparent to light0? How do I turn off shadows? (Как сделать взаимную прозрачность источников света и отключать тени?) Прошу прощения - перепутал софт

Hi Alex! This currently not supported, I have switched it off some day due to some other problems and lighting inconsistency because of this (don't remember exact problem).
Will try to return this feature for next 0.56 lighting release. Right now working hard on displacement mapping
Btw, your english is good enough. And russian would be nice in VK group

I have added to TODO list: object visibility properties, ray switch (material/shader), improve shadow catcher with more props.

I hope to do next release in a week, but we will see how things work. Right now there is a need to reduce huge counts of tesselated micropolygons. Other things are in a good shape now.
Many additional good ideas related to displacement (better perfomance/memory/flexibility) have been accumulated and I think there will be another alpha release for displacement mapping (closer to 0.7)

Evgeniy, the example from Cinema that you show presents a little bit different from what I understand as shadow catcher. In your example there are different material properties for reflection rays, camera rays and shadow casts. E.g. reflection rays from sphere see the checker that is not seen from camera directly).
I think it's a little bit different functionality from shadow catcher. Usually what you have shown is called RaySwitch material (e.g. in Corona) where you assign different materials for Camera, Reflection, Diffuse, Refraction, etc. rays. And there are also some features that implement exclusion of some 3D objects from reflections or camera or shadow casts from other objects. With all this flexibility and based on physical light transport under some constraints you may implement many interesting solutions. And it's possible to add these things to CentiLeo in the future.
What I understand as shadow catcher is a different thing a little bit. It is a tool to add 3D computer graphics objects inside a photo. And the essential thing is to draw shadows casted by CG objects onto the ground in the photo. You usually make a plane (or some more complex object) and place objects on top of it, enable shadow catcher and there you get shadows without additional illumination on the photo. Howefer, I think we can make the option to light source to add lighting on the photo (to the region with shadow catcher material). And it's also possible to make shadow catcher for alpha-channel only: on beauty it renders without background color on the plane but in alpha channel it still draws the shadows. What do you think about that?

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Daniel Westlund wrote: Thanks and sorry for my late response. I still think it would be a good Idea to be able to set the color of the shadow catcher by hand and not always relate to the background image. //Daniel

just need to understand how this functionality should work and then we can probably do it