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.

Hi Glen! This is very nice looking reflections! Thank you for coming here )

Certainly in the arms of artists CentiLeo is more realistic than in our arms)

Everybody blames our material UI, so I started a topic where we can think how to change it. The amount of properties is probably ok, it's similar to Arnold. But UI is confusing for users with stable habits.

But we need to work more on the speed of rendering. It should be faster soon.

Everyone who has written here complained about usability of material UI.

So, one problem of black rendering without running IPR is one thing and will be solved.

And let's think about another problem of layouting it. I need the help of D K, Alexey Brin and pBarrelas regarding this problem.

First, I suggest to make standard button (>) for each shader slot which if non empty also creates a direct button to existing shader/texture and (...) to select bitmap. But if there are several nested shaders, they are unrollable and there could be some bugs with values updating which I saw with other engines too. But need to test it again.
Using this standard button will also consume more UI space vertically. But they are unrollable which is good.
And this button will mix our shaders with others in a menu and we will to at least pre-bake Cinema shaders to support them at least as pictures.

Do we need a checkbox together with each row with constant property and shader/texture? That checkbox can determine what is used a const value or shader for given property. Right now if shader is applied then const value contolled by slider is not used. If you want const to be used again then you need to clear the shader/texture value.

Ok, this is all can be done.

As for Tex vs Shader - that's inheritance from common parts with plugin for Max.

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pBarrelas wrote: -The material preview doesn´t always work. It stays black and doesn't give feedback no matter which parameters you´re playing with. And I´m feeling it a bit slow when it does work.

Well I know that it is sometimes black (when IPR is not working). If you start IPR then it should update with pictures. It will be fixed. There are also no previews for some kinds of shaders like binary, falloff, blend. Will need to accelerate it too. So, it doesn't allow to move sliders smoothly as usual? I think it's image buffer priniting operation, will look deeper.

Hi Paulo, thanks for response! I have replied to PM too btw.

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pBarrelas wrote: -No Object Tag (compositing tag). -No camera Film Offset support. -Does´t take into account object visibility flags. -No camera tag in order to control Post-Render settings per camera, Currently, we can only contril this globaly.

These drawbacks go to the todo list. What this object tag has to do? There are so many opportunities to place there like making priorities for material inheritance in the hierarchy of objects and placing priority for different displacement shaders attached to instances of one only object.

As I understand the Film Offset is a more general trapezium in world space used for camera instead of rectangle?

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pBarrelas wrote: -After creating a new material, the material preview doesn´t update properly.

Do you mean that it's black when IPR not working? I know about it and need to fix some things to make previews always working regardless of IPR.
Or is there some other problem?

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pBarrelas wrote: -Pause/Resume button in IPR window. -A switch button between Render Settings resolution and a smaller custom resolution that respect the resolution ration, for fast testing. -Faster material previews. -Override material in render settings. -Fast architectural glass to speedup calculations on window panes. -A control to render the Productions Iterations through time. This we can chose to render up to a certain iterations number or time. -Picture Viewer feedback of the current image pass (iteration).

1) Ok
2) Do you need separate resolution control to be enabled in IPR?
3) Not fast enough? We made it lower quality than in Octane and Corona, but faster. Maybe there is some bug, lag, need to see.
4) Ok
5) We have it if Transparency roughness = 0. It basically works as is: the rays starting from the camera to the first diffuse hit are refracted, and then they work with IOR = 1 (no refraction).
6) There is control of production render iterations (see page 9 in user manual). However it works for everything: for render region, viewport and picture viewer. Probably need to separate these controls. Also there probably need to make time limit as alternative to the number of iterations. And I think there can be confusing thing with "number of iterations" vs "number of samples/pixel" which may differ for given number of iterations and different resolutions. Need to clarify this.
7) Do you want to have an informational status bar on Picture Viewer? There is currently just a small stupid green progress line. Also need to make a status bar for scene loading process.

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D K wrote: Sure, I'll try to elaborate on shader system later this or next week. Node based GUI would be great, too bad it's that time consuming.

D K, thanks a lot for your participation!

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D K wrote: - Render region - single most important thing missing. - Per-camera dof settings. (Usually it's implemented via camera tag) Post render settings in tag would be handy too. - Dynamic resolution with a lock button in liveviewer (in octane image conforms to the windows' size and locks render resolution with a special button) - Physical sun&sky.

Hi D K, thanks for report! Btw, we have region render when you select render region in the same menu as picture viewer then you can draw one or more region renders. I did it last night when was also confused without it

Image resolution - it is controlled by the resolution specified in Render Settings -> Output as in Cinema standard renderers. However, if render settings are not applied at all then by default it is fixed at 800x600. But you can change it realtime in that Output menu.

As for per camera dof and physical sky then it's a must have of course. Well be done alongside motion blur.

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D K wrote: Also here's a little bug report. When there's a shader effector in the scene - iterations are constantly interrupted thus render is stuck at 1-2 iterations and doesn't go further.

I have also reproduced with after-publish tests about this stupid bug. For example when Sun expression tag is applied to Infinite light then it always restarts. But it can be unlocked if you uncheck "Set Light Color" flag (or something similar may work with other expressions). We will solve it.

Alexey and D K, please can you cocretize more about better material organization. Let's improve it. I know, our's is not complete, for example there is a bug that materials have black preview when IPR is not running and that there is no normal copy/paste of shaders among different materials. In general we want to make these basic things and also we want visual node based shaders GUI like Slate in 3ds max or like Arnold or Octane have in C4D. This node based GUI mode will take quite some time to implement.

Alexey,

What would you say by midnight if you started using Octane today too? It's easy to say that something is userfriendly even if it's old used Dos command line.

For example, Octane material has tabs from left to right: Diffuse, Specular, Roughness, Film, Displacement, Opacity, Index... They are completely chaotic. For example, which layer among Specular, Diffuse, Roughness or Film evaluate the lighting first? You know and I also know because we opened it years ago to learn how it works. But for unprepared person it is unclear without docs, tutorials and years of propaganda where is Roughness, it can be done for Specular or Diffuse or both. It's simply unclear. And why Diffuse goes before Specular even if Specular is executed first because it is the tint over diffuse

Can you tell where is Octane's anisotropy property? It can strech the highlights and they should be rotated too. It should be near the roughness or gloss prop. But there is no one.

Instead, in our system we tried to organize material layers such that those with the highest priority go first (from top to bottom or from left to right). And there things such as IOR (using Falloff shader) or Roughness propery can be applied to each distinct layer to make some artistic look or make carpaint or whatever you image.

And also look at Octane's multi-material (2 slots) and our multi-material (up to 10 slots). I know it is possible to connect many Octane mix materials with mix of the mix of the mix.

Hi Alexey, Thanks for reply! Shading system is under development, it needs polishing, copy/paste between different mats and needs node based GUI for shader network too. This is priority together with more shader operations.

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Alexey Brin wrote: but for beginners or people who used to have more clear naming of parametrs (like color, reflection, refraction, opacity etc) it will not be so understanable.

Naming of which params do you ask? We name them with these names, except using Transmission instead of Refraction because our Transmission can be either refraction or trivial opacity (with IOR=1)

As for dockable IPR - you are perfectly right, this is a good opportunity in C4D to do it unlike in Max.

Hi everyone!

In short the download link for Cinema 4D plugin is here http://centileo.com/forum/forum18/ (registration required to access it)

User manual download: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5kItSF2ZGc_WG5heWtmZ0gxQXc

We init the public adventure of CentiLeo renderer for Cinema 4D R16 and R17!

This video shows interactive CentiLeo integrated into Cinema 4D for a scene with 8.5 million primary polygons and 15 million displaced. Single GTX 970 (3.5 GB total) is used for this video process


System requirements

- OS Windows 7 or higher
- NVIDIA GPUs with at least 2 GB of VRAM and compute capability of 2 or higher.
- GPUs with at least 3 GBs are recommended.
- Latest GPU drivers are recommended.
- Main RAM with at least 4 GB (8 or 16GB are recommended).
- Cinema 4D R16-R17

Features of CentiLeo for Cinema 4D plugin

Geometry
1) Out-of-core geometry meshes (even hundreds millions polygons) with GPU acceleration and without GPU memory limits.
2) Adaptive on-the-fly displacement mapping with pixel precision.
3) Fast support of dynamic meshes at scene load time and during modeling with opened CentiLeo IPR window.
4) Native Cinema 4D instancing accounting on-the-fly.

Light transport (GI) solver
1) Noise-driven path tracer which accelerates rendering noisier image parts when other parts are already clean.
2) Metropolis lighting solver with firefly killer option which can improve over the path tracer for some complex lighting situations, however it is not always better than the path tracer.
Textures
1) Out-of-core and out-of-CPU RAM textures with GPU acceleration. This means that sometimes the textures may not fit even CPU memory and this case is handled.
2) Up to 16K x 16K texture image files.
3) Up to 100K textures in the scene.
4) Texture file reader is currently based on FreeImage library (http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/). All inherited limitations like the lack of certain formats will be resolved soon.

Materials and Shaders
1) CentiLeo Standard material (cntlStdMat) with 2 reflection lobes (also anisotropic), 3 SSS layers, diffuse layer and transmission layer, 2 bump map slots (global and reflection only). 30 properties overall, shaders can be applied to everything.
2) CentiLeo Multi Material (cntlMultiMat) which can combine up to 10 cntlStdMats.
3) Multi Material has displacement mapping and geometry mask slots.
4) Currently only own CentiLeo shaders are supported:
a. cntlTexture (Bitmap, file with image)
b. cntlNoise (procedural noise)
c. cntlHDRI (used for environmental maps)
d. cntlConst (for arbitrary values)
e. cntlTriplanar (implements triplanar UV projection)
f. cntlFalloff (mixes two shaders based on IOR falloff)
g. cntlColorCorrection (edits the color output of another shader)
h. cntlBlend (mixes two shaders with a shadered blend)
i. cntlBinary (performs binary basic math operation on 2 shaders like add, mul, sub, div, pow, min, max)
j. Substantially more shaders will be added in this list with special priority to Dirt, Carpaint, Gradient, Multi-Texture and more Noise types and 3rd party shaders.

Light sources
1) Basic Area, Directional, Spot and Point (spherical) light types are supported as objects.
2) Options of lights visibility for certain material layers.
3) Option to select the light pass id for certain light source.
4) Environment mapping can be enabled in CentiLeo Renderer settings for different material layers.
AOVs for compositing
1) Support for rendering up to 8 light passes which are rendered in parallel with Beauty image. These can be saved as separate image layers for further manipulation in compositing tools.

Camera
1) Only perspective camera view is currently supported
2) Depth of Field controls with sensor width, focus distance, number of blades and blade angle.
3) Motion blur is yet to be done (after Hair and Fur).

Interactive Preview Render
1) Same scene rendering as production mode.
2) Interactive reaction to camera motion
3) Interactive reaction to geometry mesh edits
4) Interactive reaction to object motion/rotation and etc.
5) Correct recognition of Cinema 4D hierarchical geometry instances and objects on the fly while modeling
6) Interactive reaction to lights/environment/materials/shaders edits.
7) Switch on/off reaction to mesh edits
Switch on/off per frame retesselation if displacement mapping is present
9) Selector of auto-focus point on the screen

Limitations
1) Up to 30 total ray bounces and up to 10 diffuse ray bounces.
2) Up to 16K textures
3) Up to 100K textures
4) Up to 2M instances of meshes in one scene
5) NVIDIA only GPUs with compute capability 2.0 and higher and at least 2 GBs of device memory (however we recommend 3 and more GB of memory).
6) Windows only version of Cinema 4D is currently supported.

Features in TODO list

1) Multi-GPU support
2) Further light transport render math improvement
3) ForestPack/RailClone
4) Multiscatter
5) Full motion-blur
6) Hair and Fur
7) Further displacement mapping improvement
More AOVs (more beauty, info and mask with more customization)
9) Post production Glare, Bloom and Flare, LUTs
10) Many explicit mesh UV sets
11) More procedural UV sets
12) Dirt, special carpaint, gradient, multi-texture, more noise types and other shaders
13) More photography camera options
14) Mesh lights with emission texture
15) Include/Exclude lists for lights and objects
16) IES lights
17) Shadow catcher
18) Procedural Sky system
19) Volumetrics
20) Proxy meshes
21) Support CentiLeo textures display in viewport
22) Support most common Cinema 4D and 3rd party materials, lights and maps as direct translation and conversion to CentiLeo analogues
23) Utility light lister
24) Utility texture cache upfront creation
25) Utility of production rendering for prepared scene outside of Cinema 4D
26) And more features, connections with 3rd party plugins and popular data formats improving the renderer

Known issues to be solved soon:

1) No yet multi-GPU (started working)
2) No yet support for Pascal GPUs (like GTX 1080). All we need is to transit to CUDA 8
3) May not initialize if AMD GPU is in your computer together with NVIDIA GPU.
4) Very limited scene converter tool from other renderers (only diffuse property and textures from standard C4D material)
5) Black material previews when IPR mode is not running

Have fun!

Hi Jim, thanks! I am preparing the package of it for the first time. Just need several hours

Hi Walid,

This issue was solved, you can check for update http://centileo.com/forum/forum13/63-download-link-centileo-for-3ds-max-v042-alpha

We tested it on the same GPU as yours. Hope yours will run well too.

Sorry for some delay Late coming bugs have been also solved yesterday.