Quote
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?

Quote
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

Quote
Oliver Bennett wrote: Huge fan of Centileo in Cinema 4D, I can't wait to see what comes next!

Hi Oliver! And welcome to CentiLeo!
There was a lot of R&D done since the begin of the year. Very soon there will be 3 new releases one after another. E.g. the next one will get displacement mapping.

Hi Daniel, here is an example scene attached. Pictures:
1.png - plane, teapot and 2 lights, black background (almost black)
2.png - shadow catcher checked for plane material (diffuse property takes background color)
3.png - background grey just to show that there are shadows there (and plane recieves the shadows). Same would be with image background
4.png - Alpha channel enabled
5.png - changed shadow intensity by light source (inside shadow catcher materials). Those shadow intensities are relative to each other. The higher the "shadow catcher" value of the light source the stronger the shadow.
6.png - Alpha channel displayed

I think we need more flexible AOV funtionality to collect various portions of image and various GI/reflection/refraction subimages.

Hi Daniel! Here shadow catcher works as designed in all images.
1. There is a green (green?) diffuse material + some reflection and you see the GI reflected from it and visible by camera.
2. When you turn on shadow catcher then it replaces the diffuse color with the color of environment map for the current context (i.e. for primary visibility this is env map for camera, for reflected rays it is env map for reflection, etc.) In your example the environment map is black, that's why diffuse color of shadow catcher material is black too.
3. And when you turn off reflections then the ground plane become black entirelly: no reflections and black diffuse (because black bacground).

You may get the picture of shadows if you make the environment map not black (green, white or anything you like) and enable Alpha channel in AOVs rollout. If you enable it you will be able to get Beauty and Alpha without background picture but with all that shadow casts (with white alpha for shadows and black alpha for lit regions).

Returning to picture 1 - you want' to collect the picture of green GI? But it's green because the ground diffuse is green (and light is white) - right? If we want the shadow catcher picture to be green too, then need to enable it and make green background but switch if off from visibility in AOVs rollout (somewhere in the top of menu - dont' remember correctly, I am writting from memory).
If you still have problem with it I will upload a scene tomorrow with settings

As for SSS - then it needs currently under development displacement and some other polishing, eg. SSS sets where we could assing some numbers to objects or materials and compute shared SSS influence for objects/materials with same SSS set number.
Current new version development is going very well, but it required to make things that were planned for more distant future, that's why it's goibg longer then we want.

Let me check the focus distance issue and fix. The next version is always soon, but still fixing few new issues.

Quote
Daniel Westlund wrote: Thanks. Also the shadowcatcher only works when the background override is on, set to higher than 0. Otherwise I cant get an alpha channel. Also it would be great if the secondary light of the matte object was optionaly reflected. //Daniel

Hi Daniel, I will double-check it again for zero values. Maybe it considers that with values 0.00001 the background override is working but it's black as with zero (almost black).
You can switch off the secondary illumination of shadow catcher object if you switch on the shadow catcher checkbox and swicth off reflections. This way it will show just the background and shadows, but will ignore reflections (that are on by default).

I will fix that soon!

Hi Daniel,
I understand your feelings
And I also respect Blender very very much. However, we should make few other things before that:
1) We need to reach 0.6 release (a very improtant one with hard features in todo list).
2) Then need to make 0.7 with much simpler but usefull features.
3) And promote all of this with galleries, video lessons and etc.
4) We also need Maya from the world of Autodesk )
And only after that the Blender plugin can be done. Making a plugin code is not a big problem, but making it friendly with Blender licensing (free open source) is some thing that need to be done without forcing the end user to suffer with potential issues related to license.

Hi Rodrigo,
As for ID tag - it shouldn't work. It's created for internal storage of some info, not for user. It's a hidden tag, so there is some bug of Cinema that you see it
But there will appear some Object Tag to do more things than that.
As for the rest - ok, will do that.

Hi Blake and welcome to CentiLeo page!
The documentation is very old already. Displacement was deactivated at some point due to many bugs. I am currently working on a new displacement implementation just for the next release, it will be better and faster. The documentation will be updated few releases later.

Quote
Ben Jerrems wrote: Just installed your renderer to my plugins folder and cinema crashes when trying to load the plugin. If I remove your folder cinema loads perfectly. C4DR18. splash screen error

Hi Ben! Thanks for bugreport! Please can you describe your PC configuration (which GPUs?) and version of display drivers. Do you have any AMD GPU in your pc?

Quote
Aimar NL_21 wrote: hi guys . in r19 when i try render All frames it's just rendering first frame .

Update 0.541: Fixed bug for CentiLeo in Cinema R19 where animation frames were not recorded

Aimar, no need for your scene. I have detected a problem in R19. But in R18 everything is ok! Strange thing! I go to fix it.
Btw, do you use R19 Demo or activated licensed version?

Quote
Aimar NL_21 wrote: hi guys . in r19 when i try render All frames it's just rendering first frame .

Hi Aimar! I have just tested animation, it was ok, all frames were generated. Please, can you send me this .c4d file for tests?

0.541 update: bugfixes in cntlmax integration for cntlLight, cntlProxy, instancing and IPR
Daniel Westlund, there is a fix with Max Compound Scatter object

Heavilly SSS, DOF and also glass, 25 light bounces, 1920x1080. 20 min for 20 CentiLeo iterations on 2x970GTX.
Faster than other GPU renderers.