Hi Rodrigo! I hope to make releasable news soon
Technically things are going well, but we had to rearrange things in preview of material editor, out-of-core texture engine and IPR. Currently finishishing some IPR bugfixes. We realised that it was needed to diverge some rendering resources (ME and IPR) and make them more compact just for the purpose of nice scalability in the presence of multi-GPU. That's why it took longer than promissed. But I hope very much to release it ASAP within a week, but let's keep fingers crossed because previous promises have failed
Maybe to make release sooner we will postpone some planned things like GGX (which don't influence on multi-GPU) to 0.49.

The window look is really cool!
The other thing I like is dark cover on top of the bed. So, does it also use GGX emulation?

I think 32 min is ok for laptop GPU for this scene. Resolution 1600x860?

As for displacement:
Why using it as modifier is more convenient than through maps? Due to speed of tesselation?
In 0.48 displacement is broken with new tech and it seems to get quite a lot of time to fix it. Fixing it will be postponed to one of the next few versions. But the good thing is that there is very good chance to accelerate the tesselation speed by a lot! It should happen in seconds.

Wow!! 7000, personal renderfarm? How many GPUs in each machine?

Thanks a lot for support!

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play boy wrote: i just bought the GTX 1080ti SLI render machine. i think i could be of help for testing the new Muti-GPU function.

Btw, how many GPUs in machine?
1080ti should be exceptionally good for rendering!

Hi Ali, thanks for sharing! The picture has many nice things, but I would work more on the walls. Is it bump or normal mapping? Maybe displacement geometry?

There is also some Photoshop here. I think that CentiLeo needs bloom and glare in one of the future versions.
The neareset CentiLeo 0.48 will get more tonemapping (post-pro) controls.

How have you made the windows? What material properties? That rain water on the windows - is it done with the texture of roughness or IOR for glass?

And what GPU and render time?

#1 We had the manual trick with cache manipulation http://centileo.com/forum/forum19/93-recomendation-to-increase-render-speed-and-reduce-lags which allows to increase the render speed. Now this works automatically. This is needed for production mode in 3ds Max and for Picture Viewer in C4D.

#2 Now the renderer consumes the GPU memory not larger than available scene geometry needs + some rays cache (up to 1GB) + texture cache (up to 768MB). This fixes the problem reported by Aimar http://centileo.com/forum/forum19/84-centile-and-vram-problem. If there is more geometry than GPU memory then out-of-core comes in but now it is more efficient due to improved data transfer and data storage.

#3 In Multi-GPU system all the available memory of single GPU will be utilized. For example if you make the render of scene using one 4GB and one 8GB GPU then the first GPU will utilize up to 4GB of memory and the second GPU will utilize up to 8GB of memory. And the first GPU in the same render may use out-of-core operations while the second may use no OOC operations because of larger capacity.

#4 However there are still some details related to limiations that we need for robustness: if some GPU is very small like 1.5-2GB then it can accept up to 30M polygons and 100K mesh instances and if GPU has more than 4GB then it may accept up to 400M polygons and 1M mesh instances. All GPUs larger than 4GB have same limits.
If you combine 2 or more GPUs with different limitations in one scene render then the smallest limitation will apply for all other GPUs. The limits are quite high and will be higher one day.

But if all GPUs in the system have same limits then #3 will effectively work.

Still working on the other things, now on the part related to texture transfers to multiple GPUs and there is some fight between few features e.g.:
1) efficient texture cache utilization inside the bucket (needed for better speed increase due to more GPU)
vs
2) image-space noise-driven adaptivity at low sample rates

Hello everybody!
Previously, I was too optimistic on release date. We worked very hard but still have few tasks to make 0.48 update finished.
Development is advancing very well, local results are very good and the speed and interactivity of the renderer are improved noticeably. Hope to publish CentiLeo 0.48 soon, I think it's a matter of week or so.

There is no yet implemented "emission channel"... Will try to implement it in one of the near future versions.
However, one small trick is possible if you apply cntlConst shader with large value to diffuse channel. This way it will reflect a lot more light.

In bump channel it is possible to combine black&white bumps and normal maps.
However there is some small drawback is that when you apply colorCorrect on top of bump shaders then you need to extend the range of "clampA and clampB" values to negatives. Our bump channel also needs a shader for procedural flakes.

Hi Mike, welcome to our forum!

We are currently working on the multi-GPU and few other improvements for 0.48 such as better IPR, better look and better out-of-core.
This should be more interesting. However, many more things are planned for alpha version.

Please, don't hesitate to write what you want to see in the renderer! We listent to it. However right now the amount of accumulated requests is so large that we can't do them all immediatelly. But step by step these requested features will be performed. And of course we need to make the integration with C4D better, tighter and more native.

For example, I am desperately can't wait when will work on hair&fur and particles Because it is hard and very interesting. The other things are much easier.

Some small internal progress, we have improved geometry data storage by around 30%. Now more polygons will fit into geometry cache and it is also good for "out-of-core" case.
Still working on the rest of the TODO list.

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Konstantinos Despotis wrote: Hello!, Any updates on the next version with multi GPU support? Can't wait to try it.. No rush or anything, just an update on where its at.. I've read also about the hack attacks, hope they didn't delay much of the progress.. keep up the good work, and keep us updated! Konstantinos

Hi Konstantinos,

That attacks don't delay anything. This is just an unpleasant thing that my friend is working to fix.

The work on multi-GPU is going well. It takes some time because we have quite large pipeline of parallel sub-programs inside the renderer.

There are also a few things that should be done in a renderer that 1) should fix not-loaded procedural objects for Picture Viewer, 2) and would like to hide and automate that 2x manual renderer acceleration trick (see http://centileo.com/forum/forum19/93-recomendation-to-increase-render-speed-and-reduce-lags) which is important for final renders and animation.

0.48 will be published when everything will be clarified with it. I think it may take at least 2 more weeks or something like that.

Maybe you have read that we made some GI acceleration (see http://centileo.com/forum/forum21/106-status-of-preparing-centileo-048-alpha)
And we also made support for up to 4 UV sets per mesh (in Cinema terms up to 4 UVW tags) that can be selected in any texture. After 0.48 will continue in this area to support more procedural texture mappings and transformations as TextureTag offers.

The goal is to make 0.48 closer to "production state" and then to continue implementing features requested by users. The path is very clear.

Hi Theia,

Currently we don't yet support native C4D shaders but have own set of shaders. However, we have IPR mode which understands everything (i.e. it responds to material, shader, lights, object motion and polygon editing inside object). This IPR is final frame quality and has button to transfer image or beauty passes to Picture Viewer. Since upcoming CentiLeo 0.48 the responsiveness of IPR will be further improved.

We plan to implement support for native C4D shaders as much as possible. But right now it is necessary to make more core features like motion blur, mesh emitters, hair, massive particles.

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Gael LE GOLVAN wrote: Congratulations...we can see very nice details in dark areas and the colors are nicely rendered. Very nice work !

Thanks Gael! Yes, dark regions are rendered better now. This is also important for further post work based on outputted image layers.
Also it is possible to enable one "fake" feature that helps rendering darks even better. The light sources have the checkbox "contribute to GI only". If checked then the light source contributes to GI only (i.e. to the secondary diffuse bounce) as you can see in the recent post by Ali http://centileo.com/forum/messages/forum17/message461/98-centileo-for-3ds-max-0462-available#message...

However, pictures in the current thread have no enabled "contrib to GI only".

Hi Rodrigo,

Very big thanks for your feedback! Not easy to do everything early. But step by step we will work on this.

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Rodrigo Bitencourt Rodrigues wrote: Translucency can be a channel instead inside Diffuse?

So, you want to have Translucency in the separate Tab. Right? Do you think it needs the "Weight" like other channels?

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Rodrigo Bitencourt Rodrigues wrote: Std material can be only with diffuse and an reflection coat on by default.

I aslo thought about it. Will probably swich off checkboxes of the layers "Reflection 2", "Transmission", "SSS" but make their respective Weighs = 1. When checkbox is enabled the weight is already there.

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Rodrigo Bitencourt Rodrigues wrote: SSS channels can be grouped(splitted is not handy)

All in one Tab? Ok.

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Rodrigo Bitencourt Rodrigues wrote: Translucency mix slider is not working

Will fix

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Rodrigo Bitencourt Rodrigues wrote: IPR status info can be off by default.

At some point I will make this and other toggles of IPR to be saved with the scene file.

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Rodrigo Bitencourt Rodrigues wrote: We need a bump intensity slider to positive and negative values(like cinema 4d standard material.

Ok, will extend the range of the main bump strength slider. However now it is possible to do it inside the bump texture in cntlBitmap when you play with out_rangeA and out_rangeB. E.g. when you make out_rangeA=1 and out_rangeB=0 the bump goes inverted. Similar effect happens when out_rangeA=0 and out_rangeB=-1. It's also possible to make it negative with cntlMath shader with mutliplication by -1

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Rodrigo Bitencourt Rodrigues wrote: Our displacement need a scale input.

It has it actually. When you change the value of out_rangeB from 1 to 10 then displacement become higher 10x. When you make out_rangeB=-1 it goes under the surface and so on. When you change out_rangeA to the value other than 0 you can change the "sea level". It seems we need to make cntlDisplacement shader with respective naming convention.

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Rodrigo Bitencourt Rodrigues wrote: Our material can respect the material tag uv inputs? its very important.

Right now material textures can use just the first UV tag of the mesh, the spherical and triplanar mappings.

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Rodrigo Bitencourt Rodrigues wrote: c4d allow to use multiples uv tag per object

I hope to add support for more UV tag mesh projections next version. Right now I think about making 3 UV tag mappings per mesh selectable in material shaders. Max 3 mappings is usually seen in other engines. Maybe we will be able to do more than 3 UV tag mappings. How many are needed?
Also need to add support of TextureTag params too.

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Rodrigo Bitencourt Rodrigues wrote: We need a compositing tag, a object buffer system and a material id output.

We plan to do it in a couple of versions. There are many possible ways to do it. Need to figure out the most convenient one and do it. What good example reference would you recommend?

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Rodrigo Bitencourt Rodrigues wrote: The displacement channel can be in the std material too?

Maybe yes. In one of the few upcoming CentiLeo updates there should be version with displacement improvements (there are a lot do there). There is also a chance to move displacement settings to the Tag of the object (and Opacity which is found in Multi Material will also probably go to the Tag). There is aslo a chance the displacement will understand shader networks but don't promise yet.

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Rodrigo Bitencourt Rodrigues wrote: We need a alpha channel to our material.(not like the multi material, we need one to hide some parts of the model.)

Ok, will make separate Alpha channel (limited with "specular ray depth" param of the render settings). Right now such things are implementable using Transmission channel with IOR=1 (but it will be limited to maximum ray depth in render settings) and it can be done with Opacity slot (see in cntlMultiMaterial) which has unlumited depth (but limited to only cntlBitmap input and discrete nature: the surface is either visible 100% or not).

Hope to see comments from other guys on the subject too, especially on the number of required selectable UV tags in material textures.

Sure Ali, I also have noticed that after roughness = 0.6 or maybe 0.7 the values are useless also because of some energy loss.
One option for us is to re-scale the input roughness by 0.6. But the final decision will be after adding GGX, because the highlights should look different with it.

Hello everyone!

Need to post how things are going since there are now news from us for 3 weeks already

We are working on many improvements including further noise reduction, multi-GPU, nicer material reflection look and nicer tone mapping.
E.g. the open question is whethere GGX reflection will be added or not and when we will finish multi-GPU. Hope to do it ASAP.

Few pictures about development in progress:

These are 15 min renders with scenes complex illumination interior with HDR lighting coming through 3 windows. HDR map has sharp bright sun drawn in it.
Windows have lattice to make obstacles.
The other 3 light sources are covered by some geometry: 2 lights covered by glass vases (on the left) and another one is covered by cylinder on the right.

Comparison presents "Another GPU engine", old CentiLeo 0.47 and current 0.48. Everywhere portals for windows are used, 6 GI bounces, and other settings are tuned for better performance in both engines. One 970 GTX is used for these tests.
Materials and shaders have the same complexity stucture in both engines, same amount of textures but the colors of floor and furniture are slightly different.

CentiLeo 0.48:

CentiLeo 0.47:

"Another GPU engine":

Hi Ali!
It's already added. Here is the difference between 0.47 (top) and internal 0.48 version (bottom). Everything is diffuse. 0.48 has Oren Nayar diffuse with roughness=0.4

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play boy wrote: the hard light or overbright HDRI map will cause the white clay where should be transparent in the transmission channel,or i misunderstanded something.

Hi Play boy! Very cool progress with pics!
Seems there is some SSS there?

Need to see example to understand the problem. But in general if you make a coating reflection layer on top of transmission then there will be a highlight and it should be larger with larger roughness value.

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play boy wrote: and the "shadow catcher" need a very hard light to recive a clear shadow

Do you mean a light from HDRI or another light like area/omni/spot/directional? If you use "area/omni/spot/directional" to illuminate the shadow catcher plane then they deposit the light to it taking into account where the shadow catcher shader was attached: to diffuse or reflection e.g.
If you want to get a shadow on shadow catcher from HDRI then it is indirect GI contribution only, hence very soft.
Also need to see an example of the issue.

Btw, I am going to make a slider for each light source and EnvMap tag too: Brightness and color tint for shadow catcher - similar to the settings for reflections/base/transmission.

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play boy wrote: the CentiLeo is the magic!

Hi Play boy! Your pics are nicer and nicer and continuation is needed
It seems reflection highlights are ok now. The eyes are cool!

I remember about the promise to do "Illuminate shadow catcher" option. Will do it for sure.
Based on this pic we aslo need very much natural hair geometry render and corresponding shaders.

Right now we are working on multi-GPU - this is an essential part to go out of our current "toy" status.

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Sup Sup wrote: Can you send me the file ?

Hi Sup, but Anton doesn't share his scene. He tested CentiLeo with it and has shown few pics. Don't worry we will implement procedural normal map flakes