We made some small demo about what happened for 0.45 version. It's available for Cinema 4D and 3ds Max.
Quick note: my artistic taste maybe not nice but the goal was to demonstrate the features Kirill is a pro-gram-mer!
Copy-paste video description from Youtube page:
This is the demo of CentiLeo Renderer new features 0.45 alpha update (features available for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D plugin both with interactive IPR). It supports fast rendering with many light sources and real-time adjustment of AOVs that are summed into the Beauty image. Inside "Blend Beauty pass" you can manipulate reflections, diffuse transmission, environment.
Inside "Blend Light pass" you an manipulate the light sources united into the groups called "passes". Each light pass is assigned in the special property of the light source.
Btw, take a look at how many creative look controls we have for the light source.
Also you may notice that the scene size is 8 GB (3GB geometry and 5GB textures) and it works very quickly on the single GTX 970 computing 15 AOVs in parallel (their resoltion doesn't matter, images are stored on CPU RAM during computation).
Kirill
CentiLeo Chat:
CentiLeo for Cinema 4D 0.453 available (faster, many lights, light pass blender)
Rodrigo Bitencourt Rodrigues wrote:
Feedback: I think the ipr size should be the same as the final output with a percentage control.
You can have 1920x1280 at the final render and preview it at 100% or 30% (640x426) of the size at ipr
the ipr size on centileo render tab is not handy.
Rodrigo, it can be fair. However we currently have built an autonomus IPR mode where it is possible to avoid production render in Picture Viewer at least when animation is not yet there. There is a special Save button in IPR window and everything can be exported.
Ideally this IPR tab settings should go to IPR window UI but we currently have some problems writting interfaces in wxWidgets because we need custom controls and custom styles. It just simply needs more reading of their API, digging and etc.
There should be options to lock the aspect ratio with main resoltion. There will be also the mode to fit render resolution to the IPR window size.
I am interested whether you still have bugs/crashes when manipulating material layers? After 0.453 some complains from other people have changed to positive.
Anton Bessonov doesn't need special representation, he is really great 3D artist with the highest demands.
His page
Here are a couple of his WIP tests on detailed car model.
The first one was done in one of the earliest CentiLeo. The last picture was done with 0.452 for Max (1 minute for 2000x2000) on one GTX Titan straight out of the raw render.
So, he tried to make carpaint (see second picture) with some image of normal map flakes. I think we should make some procedural flakes shader for such tasks
If you make this trick but in CentiLeo for Cinema then our renderer may perform 2x faster.
For example GTX970 works well when it is inited with GPU (geo+tex) cache less than 2GB. Then restart IPR closing and openning the IPR window again. And then while IPR is running you can up you caches more than 2GB: go to Hardware Settings, up the caches like you want and click "Apply". And it will have both good speed and larger caches which may be better for large scenes.
Sometimes GUI lags are possible when you render on the GPU which is also attached to your display. This happens because one GPU is shared among OS programs, Cinema viewport and CentiLeo.
But this trick may help eliminate these lags and run smooth even if you have one only GPU.
This thing has relation to CentiLeo's out-of-core feature and NVIDIA CUDA drivers which also compete for memory.
When we will work on multi-GPU feature we are going to make this process automatic so that you will have no headache with such tricks irrelevant to creativity. This is our aim!
PS: One more recommendation is to render on one or more GPUs that are not attached to display. And leave "display" GPU to the OS and viewport, it can be just some basic small GPU.
CentiLeo Chat:
CentiLeo for Cinema 4D 0.453 available (faster, many lights, light pass blender)
[C4D plugin] Fixed non-working camera tag.
[C4D plugin] Fixed a couple of negligible bugs.
[C4D plugin] Reduced the frequency of IPR scene/camera update detector.
[C4D plugin] At the moment the camera doesn’t update during motion, only after mouse button is up. After testing will return back the updater during motion
[C4D plugin] Added a setting “IPR refresh time[ms]” in RenderSettings->IPR menu which is 100ms by default and it controls how often CentiLeo checks for updates of the scene.
Download here:
CentiLeo Chat:
CentiLeo for Cinema 4D 0.453 available (faster, many lights, light pass blender)
It seems that problem is with us. Need to detect it. Does it crash Cinema? Does it overload the CPU? Can you please from the start switch off "update scene" which auto-updates it and see what happens?
Our weak point right now is almost no support of native Cinema materials/shaders. We implement everything own just for the start, currently we are in the stage of main graphics features implementation like multi-GPU, fixing displacements, motion blur, accelerating interiors and few more procedural shaders. Currently our material is similar to aiStandard of Arnold. But there will be definetly work to support native Cinema materials. Let's move to 0.45 thread
Not promissed, but fixed however with delay... Test it please.
Actually you have found some hard coded limitation inside our plugin code. We have simply stopped traversing the object graph after the level of 5. So there were missing elements. Now the limit is 15. Not so good that it is a limitation but it is high. Actually we want to get rid of such limitation and support nested scene graph inside CentiLeo in a similar way to Cinema. Right now internal graph of CentiLeo is flat list of instances similar to 3ds Max exported lists. But we hope to generalize it in some future.
Now CentiLeo 0.452 alpha for Cinema 4D R16-R18 is available.
Download here:
Recommendations to reduce lags:
Download shaderball:
User manual updated fro 0.44:
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.453 alpha (2016 Dec 1)
[C4D plugin] Fixed non-working camera tag. [C4D plugin] Fixed a couple of negligible bugs. [C4D plugin] Reduced the frequency of IPR scene/camera update detector. [C4D plugin] At the moment the camera doesn’t update during motion, only after mouse button is up. After testing will return back the updater during motion [C4D plugin] Added a setting “IPR refresh time[ms]” in RenderSettings->IPR menu which is 100ms by default and it controls how often CentiLeo checks for updates of the scene. Change Log: cntlc4d 0.452 alpha (2016 Nov 30)
[core] Significantly better performance when there are many light sources in the scenes. You may notice better noise cleaning when there are more than 10 light sources. E.g. when there are 500 light sources in the scene then 0.45 may render 50x faster than 0.44.
[core] Special image AOV called “Blend light passes”. Recall that light passes can unite several light sources of the scene. When allocated in AOV rollout together with other light pass AOVs then you can change the brightness and color tint for each AOV in post without re-rendering. Currently these settings are only in render settings.
[core] Same post-process feature as above but with “Blend beauty passes”. When this AOV is enabled then you can mix beauty passes Environment, Reflections, Base, etc.
[core] The simple Visibility settings of light sources (with on/off state only) were changed to more flexible spinners with range 0..infinity and with additional color tint per each Visible material layer by individual light source.
[core] Shadow catcher as shader. Now you can attach the color of background to any color slot of material (for diffuse or say reflection) and it will work correctly. It also supports rendering to alpha channel of shadows from HDRI which are casted to the object with shadow catcher.
[core] Alpha channel with automatic black background rendering. To render beauty and light passes with alpha channel select corresponding checkbox in AOV rollout. When selected the alpha channel will be included and the background from non-background passes will be black (this avoids artifacts on the border of opaque object and background).
[core] Translucency slot for CentiLeo standard material (placed together with diffuse).
[core] IOR slot for each reflection layer of CentiLeo standard material.
[core] Fixed confusion when color doesn’t change in case of changing the weight of some material layer (of this is the only enabled layer of material).
[core] Advanced mixing mode for CentiLeo Multi-Material. Now each layer has the checkbox “is coat”. When it is selected then the current material coats on top of materials under it (it is old mode of CentiLeo 0.44). When this checkbox is not selected then the current material is evenly mixed with the underlying materials.
[core] Added multipliers for Direct Lighting, Direct Specular and Indirect Lighting components of the rendered image. They force re-rendering and affect all beauty and light pass AOVs.
[core] Fixed weird bump map and normal map bugs when they are scaled using cntlMath/Binary or cntlColorCorrection.
[core] Fixed a couple of bugs which could caused crashes.
[core] Fixed numeric bug which caused render convergence slowdown for HDR lighting with very bright region.
[IPR] Added 3 modes for the Region Render (play = start drawing render region, pause = fix current render region, stop = continue render the full image).
[IPR] Fixed bug with appearing strange black borders when Region Render is changed to full image render.
[C4D plugin] GUI lags – fixed. But it needs testing from all of you
[C4D plugin] Normalize light energy option for light tag asked by Tiago
[C4D plugin] Strength for bump slots
[C4D plugin] Fixed default/Visible modes for object visibility properties.
[C4D plugin] Fixed material inheritance in the hierarchy of objects
[C4D plugin] Per-camera dof settings and Post-processing settings via Camera tag
[C4D plugin] Fixed Bug Array.c4d reported by Aimar
[C4D plugin] Added CentiLeo menu asked by Rodrigo (however in top submenu)
[C4D plugin] Gamma in IPR and PV now is coinside and is controlled by gamma enabled in CentiLeo post-processing menu (or camera tag). You can disable it in "AOVs" menu to export only RAW HDR images to PV without post and CentiLeo gamma.
Long again, but a lot of work was done. And 3ds max plugin bug fixing which were in CentiLeo core have delayed Cinema plugin just to make it more robust.
Have uploaded CentiLeo 0.451 for Max with few crash fixes:
We have discovered a problem with initial geometry load times (when you open IPR mode). Based on 3ds Max API we currently have 2 solutions:
1) Correct loading of geometry model to CentiLeo memory format, but slow, 6:30 min for 40M poly model. This includes geometry parsing and compilation. And it eats a lot of RAM at peak consumption (and then reduced).
2) Fast geometry loader, 50 sec for 40M poly scene, 2x less greedy for RAM. But the problem is that for some CAD or some rare models it may generate wrong normals.
In 0.451 we have opted for #1 solution which correctly loads scene.
We are currently looking for the ways to make #2 correct and introduce it to the public release. It's not a matter of CentiLeo GPU geometry compiler which is quite fast. It's a matter of working with 3ds Max API. Hope it will be solved soon.
Hi muthukumaran A, sure we will make a couple of new silent videos with few new features.
Eg. basic carpaint is super simple. Just select dark blue diffuse color. Then make reflection1 weight = 1, reflection1 ior = 1.4 or similar, reflection1 roughness = 0 (and select reflection as coar chechked, this is clear coat).
After that make reflection 2 weight = 0.5, IOR = 5 or 10 or anything like that, roughness = 0.05, color light blue.
Then place a lot of area lights (or nice HDR) on top of that. You may place a couple of different HDRs for each reflection/diffuse etc.
Flakes are currently can be done with normal/bump maps to respective slos (e.g. reflection2 has own slot). Later we need to implement own procedural flakes.
As for SSS there are 3 layers there, Just for more flexibility. However they are multiple scattering
Hello Aimar, thanks for the hint! Just working on this bug and testing the things.
Will likely publish CentiLeo 0.45 for Cinema today but without this fix (and also few others mentioned). Just need to output that many new things that we have done so far in the core. But in the later few days hope we fix this and other minor suggestions too.
Hello Daniel and welcome to our board! Thanks to Rodrigo and Tiago
Usually when Cinema 4D doesn't start then it seems there is need to update NVIDIA display drivers to some latest one.
What GPU do you have? Do you also have AMD GPUs in the system?
Since 0.43 we have upgraded to CUDA 8 in order to support GTX10XX and it required all users to update drivers.
I hope today to publish CentiLeo 0.45 for Cinema which is better. For preliminary info you may see corresponding topic about Max plugin
Just started to make materials as I am being a programmer can.
One thing that we need to improve is the scene load time. Render is fast, interactive experience is also very fast.
Obviously need to make SSS/refl for skin material. It's just diffuse yet
Kirill is a pro-gram-mer!
Thank you!