+ visibility settings per light recovered
+ material preview now work cleaner
+ direct lighting with materials more complex than just diffuse is much cleaner now. Indirect lighting too

Delayed with some stupid bugs. Additionally the "visibility settings per light" were broken due to new feature in light transport acceleration. Recovering this

Hello Gael,

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Gael LE GOLVAN wrote: The area lights with portal ON have no effect inside or outside the room, u can see the result when it is on or off on my image with no other change from me.

The image you have shown are correct:
1) AreaLightPORTAL_ON.jpg - this is are light in the middle of the room with enabled "Is Portal" option. And this portal area light should not be visible. It just guides the light transport rays towards the Environment map. But correct placement of portal is inside the windows (regadles of having glass or not). In this case it will accelerate rendering of interior scene where light comes from outside and through the windows.
2) AreaLightPORTAL_OFF.jpg - this image is also correct. When "Is Portal" is disabled then it behaves as an area light that emits the light to one side of a rectangle like you see on the render window.

I think we need to create soon few topics with short articles, pictures and scenes describing this thing and few others. Just need to publish 0.43 version before that.

Thanks for feedback!

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Aimar NL_21 wrote: I'd like to be one of Pascal Testers for c4d .

Hi Aimar! Welcome here! We are completing 0.43 which should support Pascal. Right now here and there we are connecting many small things together.
Too much time was taken by

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1) General image convergence improvement when materials with several layers are used (almost done).

But results are good, you will see them in a couple of days

Hello Gael,

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Next, I added a spot light and impossible to reduce significantly the light intensity except with the radius parameter.

So, have you reduced the intensity to 0.0001 and it was still bright? I think that there can be a there with accounting scene units in the renderer.
What units are used in this particular scene? millimeters or kilometers?
I would like to recreate similar conditions.

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At least, I created 3 aera lights outside the room in front of the windows and I checked "Portal" as u wrote me in your last message. No result at all, no light through the windows...then, I increased the max ray bounces as u mentioned to 20 but still nothing as u can see on the 3rd image.

It didn't come from area light with enabled "portal" or just area lights with disabled "portal"? It's probably a bug that a portal itself occludes area lights... Need to test.

Area light with enabled flag "Is Portal" is not a light source, it doesn't produce the energy, it is a geometry shape that hint the light transport processor where to direct the rays that should find light coming from Environment map. So, it has effect (faster lighting convergence) only for the light coming from Environment map to interior through the window or windows. With or without portals it should result in same image but with a faster or slower convergence.

Area light with disabled "is Portal" is the valid light source. We have made this switcher only for convenience where one can change the window environment texture to the area light with one click.

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Concerning the point lights, they have no effect at all...

Well, it should be a bug of converter. Our converter is still very limited and it could turn the light sources to black (which are not accounted in renderer as being useless).
I have noticed in the IPR window status bar that the number of lights is 2, but in the viewport I see a lot more light sources. Please, can you tune parameters of at least one point light (Color, Intensity, Multiplier, Gamma - they all contribute to light emission, try to play with them and see what happens). There are several parameters for light emission because the Color and Intensity (and later angular distribution) will be textured soon, and multiplier/gamma will be additional increasers of the textured values.

Thank you,
Kirill

Hi Gael,

Thanks for your feedback with images. As you see we need to calibrate things here and there.

I think we need to implement camera perspective correction. Right? Or are you using orthographic camera projection in ARTrender image?

I recommend you to use portals in interior (create centileo area light with dimensions matching the window size and enable checkbox "Is portal").

If you added the lights but the interior is dark then it is probably not enough intensity, please try increasing it. Or they are occluded by the window. If you have windows then keep in mind that if you decrease the number of ray bounces in render settings too much then small amount of bounces may not be enough to reach the light.

Our displacement mapping algorithm is currently in active development. For example, it has some bugs and tesselates not so fast as we want (this should improve a lot). It will also be more featured (vector displacements and et). It seems we should make a specialised shader for displacement with units as cm, meter or km. It should also have some more controls specific for displacement like on/off autobump, shader inherirtance priority for instances and so on.

Displacement works adaptively for each changing camera frame or changing objects.
Btw, you may notice a "retesselate" flag on the IPR window. It switches on/off the automatic retesselation of the whole scene when you change the viewpoint of camera or materials. But this flag doesn't invalidate the previously created displacement solution. So it can be usefull to switch if off temporarilly while you tune the lighting and materials.

I see your issues with licenses. Your needs are totally valid. As I remember the dongles have some additional price. Will need to evaluate all the options...

Btw, what GPU do you have in a laptop? Something like GTX 980M?

Hello Gael and thanks for writting your review!

Well we are preparing a 0.43 alpha. It already took so much time. But it has what is described here http://centileo.com/forum/forum21/74-status-of-preparing-centileo-043-alpha .
Will appear here very soon. Btw 0.43 is even faster.

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I don't know how to post an image of my tests, sorry.

For some reason the image uploads were switched on this and Cinema forum (they were ON from the start). I have fixed the problem. So you may upload now your images, it will be cool to see what you have renderered

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material editor is a bit confusing, I wasn't able to make a simple glass, for example.

You are right. That was my mistake to organize materials as layers on top of each other (when top layers are 100% visible then bottom layers under it are not visible). By default the base layer has mask=1 and it makes invisible Transmission layer regardless of Trasmission mask. How to switch Transmission on (reduce the value of base mask and increase the value of Transmission mask). Shown here http://centileo.com/forum/forum15/53-how-to-create-glass-and-material-layer-organization

We fix this confusing material behavior for upcoming 0.43 version. Instead of masks all the layers of cntlStdMat will have weights relative to each other (pretty much like in Corona or Arnold). So, with this new approach when the weight of the layer is increased then the corresponding property (transmission or reflection or SSS) appears and blends with other material properties.

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I didn't find how to use an opacity on a map, I think anyway it was on a ctlmultimat, if I have readden correctly...I will have to try it. I saw it when I tryed the displacement...

Right, this is possible to apply opacity map using cntlMultiMap. It understands only cntlTexture shader (driven by image file) and in the places where image is black (pixel value < 0.5) the geometry of surface is removed, if it's white (pixel value > 0.5) then geometry is visible. It has no additional noise, and it has unlimited depth complexity (you may place many objects behind each other and they will render correctly without some black pixels after 30's or 60 objects in a row). It's useful for the leaves of trees.

For the needs of better flexibility (like different shader combinations) it is possible to use Transmission layer of cntlStdMat with IOR = 1.

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This shader , displacement is also not so "easy"... THe name of the parameter that forces the displacement is too much technical..."OutofRange2", right ? just use "Z displacement value in cm"

To switch on displacement you need to attach cntlTexture to the slot of cntlMultMaterial and then switch on tesselation in Render Settings -> rollout Displacement Mapping.
outRangeA and outRangeB are used to convert the input values of a texture to any desired range. It is the same shader that can be used for everything from color values to surface displacement values, so the idea was to have no "centimeters" or "meters" there. So, if the shader is used for displacement then these OutRange values internally use selected units of the scene.
Do you recommend us to create a separate shader with everything the same as in cntlTextute but with displacement range renamed to "Negative displacement value", "Positive displacement value" and with proper units?

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I noticed that some 3d objects had been doubled at another area on the frame buffer, that strange...Maybe a problem with instanciations in the framebuffer...

One object appeared two times in the framebuffer or two framebuffer windows were open? It the last one problem then it was fixed in 0.43 few hours ago. It appeared if you hold that button or click it several times in a fraction of second.

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So, right now, as it is in alpha version, it is not really possible to use it in real conditions as it misses many small important tools. I have made some images that show some of the parameters on a very simple Architectural project but even here, the renderer is not yet usable. Hmm, I feel criticizing the renderer, in fact no...I really find it interesting, I just want to talk about the needs, we, 3D users, face everyday.And simplicity, efficiency are the exact words

Dont' forget to criticize us, this is very useful to make it improved. We are doing this work for you. It is important to know what other things you need to improve in our renderer.

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Is there any idea to use both GPU and CPU ?

We will see, right now we are working to support simultanious rendering using several GPUs. Then there we a couple of algorithmic render speed accelerations (regardless of device), later there will be work on more features (post production, scattes, 3rd party plugins, shaders, light sources).
Adding CPU support can be considerered in a longer future (after crucial features will be done). I think it is most important in render farms.

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A suggestion for the future , when it will be sold online, I hope, we won't have to be permanently logged on internet to be able to work with it... We need a box Licence able to be changed from one computer to another thanks to a dongle or something like that... For security reasons, we cannot let the computers plugged to internet...

This is understandable, we work same way for security reasons
The sales system is not yet drawn but we account user needs and will try to find proper solutions. There is some dilemma in this important question, dongle can be an option btw.

Looking forward for your further tests!

Hello everyone!

A lot of time passed since releasing CentiLeo 0.42 for Max and Cinema. And I fell we need to post how the work on the next version is going.

The next version 0.43 is still in progress because too many things have been started for it. Some of them are quite large.
The most time consuming part is multi-GPU implementation. As soon as it's implemented we will publish the new version. It may take few days or even one week more.

So far we have already implemented:

1) Transition to CUDA 8. Now the renderer should work on Pascal NVIDIA GPUs (but we need testers for that). A wonderful thing is that even on my old GTX 970 the renderer works 12% faster with new CUDA. This new CUDA has also fixed some bugs that could touch the renderer.
2) Faster image convergence when portals are used. Not yet measured how much faster.
3) Fluent GUI responce when heavy render computations are processed by CentiLeo IPR. This is true for both 3ds Max and Cinema 4D. This is now much more pleasant to work with it.
4) More AOVs (reflection layers, base, transmission) that can be summed into beauty image. And AOV with beauty+alpha and alpha as mask.
5) 30-50% speedup when rendering large resolution images like 4K or even 10K. The speedup is better when there are a couple of AOVs computed in parallel and the image resolution is larger.
6) Fixed the bug with texture resolution downscaling for environment map visible through the glass material.
7) More bugfixes for CentiLeo in 3ds Max plugin (lile no crash with Max physical camera and Undo/Redo for materials and lights).
More bugfixes for CentiLeo in Cinema 4D (a couple of crashes and unnecessary IPR restarts were fixed).

What is still in progress:

1) General image convergence improvement when materials with several layers are used (almost done).
2) Material GUI improvements in CentiLeo for Cinema 4D (in the middle).
3) Multi-GPU (in the middle).
4) More bugfixes for small GPUs like 2GB which I talked about. Sometimes you have 2GB labeled on the GPU but in reality the OS may give you around 1GB (less than in the middle).
5) Will highly likely switch the layer organization of cntlStdMat to additive mode by default (when you tune the weights of each layer relative to each other). And there should be no confusion with stack-based priority. Will add optional checkboxes to enable old feature for material reflection layers where it is usefull.

Most time consuming things were performance improvements and now is multi-GPU. If multi-GPU will take even more time then we will wrap up what is done and release. In this case multi-GPU will be done for 0.44. Btw, for 0.44 we plan to accelerate renderer for scenes with many light sources (there are very promissing early experiments).

After finalizing 0.43 we will split the work so that new alpha versions will come much more frequent. New versions should be produced at least once or sometimes twice per week.

Hello
Really happy about this. We are really making baby steps. Multi-GPU will be released soon together with other quite large updates. Among them is better convergence and much more fluent GUI when heavy render is processed in IPR

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pBarrelas wrote: 2-The Invert checkbox serves to invert on the fly the grey scale images used on certain parameters. This speeds the workflow. 4-Is a current limitation the fact that the Displacement channel, can't be used on the "regular" material?

1) Can it be usefull to break energy conservation? Right now it is possible to make colors with values higher than 1 when using a color multiplied by some high value using cntlBinary shader. It may create some sort of Emission which is slow to converge for extreme cases. But it is possible to create very white diffuse eyes in some dark room (and it is not extreme case and will converge quickly). Later when there will be some Emission slot for material this thing will be accelerated with dedicated techniques.

2) Will think about it. Btw, there is cntlColorCorrection shader where it corrects the input shader and it is possible to make inversion when you put out_rangeA = 1 and out_rangeB = 0.
The same inversion trick works for cntlTexture (imagefile) and cntlNoise.

4) Well, I have limited displacement to one only place (in multi-material) so that it would be easier to evaluate displacement for sufrace (without gathering all the layers). Later that parts became faster and soon they will become even faster. And there will probably be an opportunity to combine many things for displacement slot. However the shaders such as cntlFallof (i.e. based on view angle) seem to be irrelevant for displacement when somebody plays with them.

"surface mask" is the only material property that will remain understanding only cntlTexture. This is so because of performance reasons. It basically enables and disables some surface region based on texture. And it allows unlimited trace depth for this feature for free. But if some shader customization is needed for such things then Transmission with IOR = 1 and shadered masks of the cntlStdMat can be used, but trace depth for this feature will be limited to the number of ray bounces (maximum supported is 30).

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pBarrelas wrote: Hi Kirill, good to know that you're considering to make the Material Editor more intuitive and user friendly! Regarding the Material Editor preview window, besides only updating when the IPR window is open, it still shows the effect of all the channels even if they are off. This makes extremely difficult to make some quick material tweaks. 1-I do agree that the standard button for each slot is better than the current implementation. 2-Having that check box would make the Material Editor more versatile. This way we can chose to use either a colour or a shader, without having to disconnect that shader. 3-Please add more Reflection Coating levels. 4-Please add a dedicated Mask channel for the entire material. 5-Turn the material channels animatable. 6-Add Emission channel. 7-Ability to use chose a certain UV Tag to be used on that channel. I honestly don't know if this is a C4D SDK limitation. Here's a possibility I worked up in PS:

Few more questions on the picture:

1) Can Reflection Color brightness be higher thatn 100%? Maybe should we use 0..1 range in place of 0..100% ? 0..1 is easier to undestand when all the shader input/output are in these absolute values (not percentages). I believe it would be easier with this considering existing math shaders and more future shaders especially when node based shader GUI will be out.

2) What invert checkbox is doing? Is it an indicator that switches between constant and shader property?

3) All the properties will be with shaders/textures including Fresnel IOR and Aniso rotations. Cool things can be done with that.

4) Displacement will not be here but probably in another material like current multi-material or separate "geometry_shader" which will be assigned as tag for an object.

5) Will highly likely add the dropdown selection of mixing mode for material layers: "stack based" (like now, higher layer override lower layers) or "weight based" (like people used to, everything is relative to each other).

Hello everyone,

I think it's important to write about found issue.

While working with CentiLeo on 3GB+ GPUs is a lot more stable (probably there were no crash-reports).

But there are still some issues with 2GB GPUs like GTX760, 660, etc. And with several tolerant guys we realised that:

1) while CentiLeo is up and running and some other 3rd party GPU based plugin also try to run too then it (3rd party plugin) may take the whole system to the crash situation when trying to access GPU which is already busy.

2) Sometimes when initializing a 2GB GPU we still get some fragmentation issue . But in one place I have noticed my own error there and the other is the fact of attempting to use the same GPU which has no free memory because of being busy by another GPU.

So, please, if you get some issues at initialization then one way is to remove the other plugins but not CentiLeo and run it for tests. If it works without problems or with less problems then please report about it and recover the plugin set that you had before.

Sometimes when the GPU is only one and is connected to a large monitor like 4K and also give resources to OS then out of 2GBs of memory the system may give to us even less than 1GB. However right now CentiLeo requires at least 1408Mb to run without problems but we realised that this memory is not always given by OS/driver/CUDA to our renderer.

Few solutions:
1) to take this issue in mind from user side
2) and we as developers will need to make different setups of internal infrastructure for small, medium and large capacity GPUs. And try make renderer operable even in the given region of less than 1GB.

We will introduce certain optimizations to the core that increase convergence. There very promising results in our research tests.
Right now will not make somebody more nervous about this because we undergo hundreds attacks everyday on this site since publishing alpha for Max. Need to see how to backup the site just for any case.

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pBarrelas wrote: Correction: in Modo, we go even deeper than channel level, we can use a different UV set per texture.

Well, this flexibility will soon be here too when more UV tags will be done. Right inside CentiLeo corner of Cinema. It's not a problem, there is an infrastructure for this. It's just a matter of portion of geometry which may remain in cache and a matter of my time compressing UV data to some level that will make me happy giving you some 5% total speed increase vs uncompressed mode

Maybe 3 is too small? Anybody uses more?

Such things are by default in Max too (despite of it's non drag&drop nature and long geometry preparation time). E.g. Max gives us geometry at 10n time, where Cinema gives it at 2n time and CentiLeo gets it in around 2n time.

Alexey, thanks for your feedback! After doing some harder programming things in the past for this engine right now it's much easier to work on UIs. So, developers are all yours and will listen to the needs

What shader/textures are used most often? I guess it's Bitmap and Falloff.

What do you think about SSS? By design it's always near diffuse and they can be weighted inside a single base layer.

Alexey, technically Translucensy is a special case of Transmission with high roughness. But it is usually done as Diffuse reflection which works under the normal direction of the surface and hence shows translucent visual effect. Right now it's possible to make Transmission and Translucensy only using mult-material and tuning the masks properlty

Patrick, hello! Welcome to our board! Please, can you first click to "debug console start" it will open console window where the errors may be printed. And then start IPR or reproduce the situation which caused the error.

And please tell about your computer and scene setup and a give please a screenshot from console with the error. It has some other info which will let us fix.

Few potential problems:
1) Pascal GPU
2) if AMD GPU is also there it may cause a problem
3) Memory grabbed by some other app.
4) Some problem may happen entering GPU initialization code in CentiLeo
5) Maybe drivers not new?

Btw if we make a global material mask and then we can assemble all the tags from left to right as an internal multi-material and get the same result as applying one multi-material.

And there can be one more special material with geometry modifications like displacement and surface discrete mask which are currently sitting in multi-material.

However in this case we need not to place user into confusion with selection tags that may use different materials for different selected polygons.

Ok I understand it all, and think that ideas are right.

As for UV maps then things are a little bit more complicated. It would be hard to support arbitrary amount of UV maps per one mesh. They consume a lot of memory. But compression optimizations are possible and rotating/moving/scaling modificators are possible for them - it's will be implemented, and they take no noticeable resources.

Right now there is one "explicit uv_mesh_set 0" which corresponds to the first UV tag of the current mesh (the left most). And they are not different for different instances since they inherit mesh data which includes UVs too. When there will be uv_mesh_set_1 then it will correspond to the next UV tag to the first one.

And selecting them is controllable not only per material in the tag list but also per each shader that uses them. There can be arbitrary shader trees for each material property. Bad that they have no yet node-based UI. Looking to cmnoeds btw.

As for "drag&droping a tag to the field" vs "selecting in a dropdown list" - should think more about it. In the first case the name of tag is clearly visible there.

What maximum number of UV maps/tags do we need to support per mesh? 3, 4, 5 or maybe 8? Some known product has maximum of 3. Some people on CPU renderers use 5.

Hi Paulo,

Emission will be added together with support for Mesh lights. It will be shaderable thing as one more material property. Probably only for multi material to make it happening only once for surface point, but with mask of course, so that some points will be emissive, some reflective - and all is driven by shaders.

Reflection Coating levels - so you recommend to unroll current functionality of cntlFalloff that can be applied to the mask or anything els and add it by default to the top level inside material. Right now it's possible with adding a shader and doing more clicks. But it is a popular shader for reflection because it's usually a coating layer, and it's mask not usually controlled with shaders other than Falloff.

Mask channel for the entire material - should it make material darker? This is possible to make a special slot.
Right now it is possible to have a mask for entire cntlStdMat if you attach it as one of the layers of cntlMultiMaterial. And attach cntlMultiMaterial to the tag insted of standart.

Turn the material channels animatable - what do you mean? Each property of material is currently animatable and has a dedicated cicle to the left of each property name.

Ability to use chose a certain UV Tag to be used on that channel - main Cinema material as I see apply UV for the whole material. We can currently apply different UVs for each shader (cntlTexture image or cntlNoise) on a per shader basis. Right now it is spherical or explicit mesh UV (which is UV tag itself). Of course we must add support of more mesh UV sets (means more UV tags to be chose from). And there should be rotation option added there.