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.

Hi Walid,

We are currently working to solve this bug. You are not the first one to report about it.
I think it is reproduced for evey scene small or big. In short, it is related to CUDA memory fragmentation which doesn't give developers as big memory blocks as they want. So we need to get memory from CUDA in many smaller blocks.

If our fix to it works out there should be solution with other fixes in 0.42 version tomorrow. Please, check this forum tomorrow. We need your further assist solving this issue completely.

Right now you can set GPU geometry cache = 1024 Mb and click "Apply HW settings" and then click "Open CentiLeo FrameBuffer". In this case it should work.
Then for interest you may test it with larger caches and then probably find the cache size when it fails. Potentially it is at 4096Mb.

Hi Bakha, thanks for testing! Nice WIP

Still noisy, how long is was it rendered and on which GPU?
What is on the street? Geometry or envmap?

I think 100 lights may converge not very fast but we will work in this area.

How is it easy to use our material cntlStdMat? Have you understood it by yourself or have you read the documentation which we provided with 0.41?

Noticed that you spots look black for direct visibility. It's our bug. Already fixed, will upload it soon.

Can you also post a topic on the Wishlist forum with all the things we need.

And another thing to try is to decrease the GPU cache sizes for geometry and textures in "Harware Settings" and push apply. Just for test reasons. If after decreasing it works without crashes then we can localise the problem.

Hi mortas may. Please, can you open "Hardware Settings" rollout in CentiLeo renderer settings, then select your second GPU (not the one which works on display and viewport), then push "Apply HW settings". And then test with it is crashing or not.

It is also important to know whether it is Windows 10 or not because in 0.40 version we have allocated the memory for the renderer not very conservatively. In Win10 seems that the OS takes around 20% or so of VRAM.

This video shows how to manipulate the standard CentiLeo material (cntlStdMat) which has 4 main layers on top of each other: Reflection1, Reflection2, Base and Transmission. Each layer has mask with values from 0 to 1 which determine particular layer visibility and the visibility of the layers under it. The principle of each layer visibility determination is stack based.
So, if Reflection1 has mask=1 in some surface point then this reflection is visible and other layers (Refl2, Base and Transmission) are not. But if Reflection1 has mask < 1 then it is partially visible and then the next layer Reflection2 is analyzed. If the mask of Reflection2 is 0 then the Base layer is analyzed until we reach the bottom most Transmission layer which has lowest priority and can be overwritten by any top layer.
On attached pictures you see the renders from the scene on the video.

Quick info on Materials and Shaders

One thing to mention is that at this moment for performance reasons CentiLeo works only with own materials cntlStdMat and cntlMultiMat. However, they are very powerful. cntlMultiMat may combine up to 10 cntlStdMat materials and cntlStdMat has 30 different properties including 2 reflections, base layer with diffuse with the Sub-surface scattering mix and with transmission. Each property of CentiLeo materials can be executed with CentiLeo shaders only (at this moment) which can be found in "CentiLeo" category in 3ds Max material/map browser.

Additionally the cntlMultiMat material has the slots for shaders with geometry opacity (it is the mask which determines where the surface is visible and where is not) and the slot for displacement shader. Both geometry opacity and displacement slots execute only cntlTexture shader (basic image file) for performance reasons because they are executed in the very performance critical parts of code. Displacement will understand the shader trees in the future however for geometry opacity we can't promise this.

Well, Evgeny Litvyakov suggested that we have problems with noise reductin with interiors with rough transparent curtain.
http://centileo.com/bitrix/components/bitrix/forum.interface/show_file.php?fid=244

And it is true, we are unhappy with that becase we need higher performance.

Here are few ideas how to solve it:
1) First, create a rectangular CentiLeo Area Light covering your windows between interior and exterior and make "is portal" flag enabled.
2) Second, try use Metropolis sampler as opposed to Path Tracer.
Metropolis is enabled with "Firefly killer" parameter.
If it is > 0 then Metroplis will be working on indirect lighting and Noise Aware path tracer will be working on direct lighting.
If Firefly killer is close to 1 then it will kill better all the hard and bright hot spots but it can also send to the grave some bright edges of indirect image portion.
If Firefly killer = 1 then it will have no fireflies with more iterations but it will be not a very honest picture. Some value like Firefly killer = 0.5 or 0.8 are very good.
If Firefly killer = 0 then both direct and indirect lighting are computed with Noise Aware Path tracing and spend ~1.5x more samples per render iteration.

See the pictures with Evgeny interior MLT (firefly killer = 0.5) vs Noise Aware Path Tracing (firefly killer = 0):
Here NAPT version computed 8:30 mins and MLT computed the same scene 6:16min (it is cleaner a little bit but looses some few detailes).

3) One more recomendation is for those people with good GPUs. Simply increase render iteration power up to 1. It denotes that every iteration will compute more samples. It will icnrease the indicator of Million samples / second (see in Interactive render window).

4) Wait until a new version with better automatic noise detection for NAPT.

Quote

Evgeny Litvyakov wrote: Могу отметить несколько вещей, которые очень понравились: 1. Сцена готовиться к рендеру ОЧЕНЬ быстро, по сравнению с другими GPU рендерами. 2. Интерактивный режим - также очень быстрый! 3. Отлично работат гамма коррекция, экспозиция, баланс белого и тд. 4. Скорость на открытых пространствах отличная! 5. Во время рендера интерфейс ОС практически не лагает, можно параллельно работать.

Here Evgeny tells about positive impressions like faster than others scene loader, fast interactive rendering, basic working post production, fast exteriors, no lags in OS while rendering.

Thanks, but it wasn't very hard. We know that others load scenes very long and are surprised about that. Btw, as scientists we are still unhappy about our render speed, we believe it can be much better and it will be.

Btw. are our post production features working correctly?

Hello Evgeny,

Thanks for your response! And congrats with the first ever reply! Call your friend here! Come on
I will reply in English so that other people world-wide may read what is happening here.

So, briefly Evgeny says the following:

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1) Problem switching the render resolution in real-time.

Reply: This problem should happen when the Output Size in Common Tab is not Custom in the combobox. When selected "Custom" it should work real-time in CentiLeo frame buffer without touching Render button.

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2) Evgeny asks about the chance to integrate Altus or internal denoiser.

Reply: As for denoiser there are pros and cons. The main disadvantage of denoiser is very big memory consumption especially on large image resolutions. It is more apparent problem for many image beauty AOVs. As far as I know Corona denoises only the main Beauty AOV and not the others. We will see, maybe it can be tolerable solution.
However, we want to implement such a feature internally (i.e. avoiding the communication with 3rd party solution which is not very convenient). Before that we will attempt to improve the current light transport solver, there are several good experiments that need optimization and integration.

Quote
3) Evgeny asks about preview for textures/shaders.

Reply: Seems to be that this problem is in Compact Material Editor. We will see what 3ds Max SDK offers about that. Otherwise will make a custom solution.

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4) and 5) Lost texture paths.

Reply: what is the length of the path in characters?
We use the standard Max asset tracker mechanism for resolving texture paths. It usually searches them in scene project root folder or in root/Textures and in some folders which can be specified somewhere in Max settings. Need to figure out this.

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6) cntlTextures not visible in viewport.

Reply: we know about this. We will try to fix that. It will be probably hard to evaluate the full shader tree for Viewport since our shader tree is complex. But maybe a lowres will be fine. We will see what can be done and how good there. Thank for that. UVW Mapping manipulation must be convenient. Probably we will make it using a more flexible functionality of our IPR mode (CentiLeo frame buffer when we will add more AOVs where you will be able to select specific shaders to display as color rather than property of material).

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7) What is the TangentUVset in cntlStdMat.

Reply: this is the array of UV channels that are used to compute the smooth tangent space which is necessary for anisotropic reflections (which are available when you increase roughness and shift anisotropy from 0 to +1 or to -1). Uvset_spherical is procedural and is based on sphere projection. Uvset_mesh_map0 corresponds to the first Uvmap channel in the modifier list of object at which this material is applied. Try to use them and change anisotropy. Later we will add supporting more UVsets from the modifiers list.

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8 ) Evgeny says that cntlTexture preview works after the settings are edited several times.

Reply: this is some jkind of feature which progressively loads the texture with more time. We will preload them for materials to make them visible at the first load.

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9) GPU is not always utilized at 100%

Reply: it should happened because our interactive mode is working in a separate thread and it shares resources with the other tasks of 3ds Max. If you have another small GPU then you could assign it for display and assign you powerful Titan Black to render only and it will give you even more performance.
Btw, because of that multi-threading things (which make interactivity possible) the production render mode (when you push Render button) is slightly faster to render because it works in the same thread as Max main thread.

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10) Lights are selected if the selection filter is Geometry.

Reply: we will try to solve this. What is your version of Max?

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11) Pixelation problem (see image).

Reply: I know about this stupid bug. You can avoid it if in the Camera rollout you enable DoF and increase the DoF focus distance. This is because of small default focus distance.
We will need to increase precision in some place of code.

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12) Noise is resolved strangely (see image).

Reply: I know about this problem. In our previous tests it was 100 times smaller visible and we haven’t solved thinking it is not important. Thanks for showing that it must be improved. Will work on that more.
Please, can you send us this interior scene for tests? E.g. you can save it on dropbox and send a link to info@centileo.com. If you need an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) for this scene then we can sign.

Thanks,
Kirgman