Thanks for wishes, Raphael!

Sure finding good or bad things from your detailed point of view would be very helpful. In the near future I plan to implement more features to make the engine more user friendly and will slightly postpone some hard-core render optimizations that I love very much . The approximate basic plan of work is here https://centileo.com/docs/index.php?COURSE_ID=3&LESSON_ID=40 Also need to make critical bugfixes, but there are not so much of them. My goal is to not overload the engine settings with a lot of purely technical parameters and rules that are very hard to explain to beginners. Ideally the parameters should be creative and respond for graphics look, but sometimes there is still an inevitable need to make some toggle "Importance Sampling" on/off and encourage a user for experiments.

The forum may accept drag&drop images right into the "Reply form" when you drag and move the images on top of it. Up to 10Mb or so per image. Once the images are loaded you may select a place in your message by mouse left button click and later click on one of uploaded image to place it to the selected point, e.g. within a table cell.
However we will probably need to upgrade the website engine because this one is quite old already.

Best regards,
Kirill

Hi DM50, the log is from Max, not from CentiLeo. Let me know about the scene parameters? It can be just a stupid proramming bug or in the other potential case this can be CPU RAM or Disc space overflow. For example, how much RAM / Disc space do you have? What's a GPU?

How many bitmap textures? Bitmap textures produce the texture caches and it can be possible they can occupy the disc.
7 minutes seems to be too high for the first pixel. It can be either thousands of texture files with cache generation or it can be some kind of 4 billion unique polygons with a GPU such as RTX 3080.
Please, tell me more about the structure of you scene, I am interested in the bug investigation.

CentiLeo 0.66: Interior
3ds Max plugin, 1200x1600, one RTX 3080, 2048 samples (32 iterations x64), 2:40min. Converted from Corona.

CentiLeo 0.65: Interior
Here is the interior render: 32M triangles, 15GB textures, the lighting from outside of room, 2 x RTX3080 10GB VRAM.
Rendering Performance: 2560x1440 image, 32 render iterations (2048 samples), the Motobike render kernel: 24M samples/second, 5:20min for the first image and 5:50 for the second, and then it’s denoised to kill the small residual noise. The Bulldozer kernel renders 32 iterations in 8 min, the noise is lower, but under denoiser it’s killed same way.

Hello Saihan and welcome to CentiLeo forum!
Thanks for sharing your nice picture with us! I am fan of Lego too, and now will go and play with my sons with their Lego 51515 Robot Inventor

I may recommend you to see the manual for Cinema 4D that describes our functionality. It's in English but there are the screenshots. And I will also publish the shaderball scene for c4d with some examples.

https://centileo.com/docs/index.php?COURSE_ID=3&CHAPTER_ID=069

Kirill

Hi Raphael! First of all thanks for bug report! Potentially fixing it can be useful even for using CentiLeo without combining with any other GPU engines.
The issue is with GPU initialization at the stage when we get the list of all available GPUs. I have some ideas about this and hope the experiments will help.

It would be certainly interesting to see results of your experiments with CentiLeo and get the feedback about the current amount of issues. There are some known issues such as dockable IPR window, a lovely feature of C4D. But there could be some other issues that need extra attention.

Don't know what to do with a forum message cutoff, maybe that was some rare accident that we can't reproduce with the tests.

Hello and welcome to our forum! Yes there will be a plugin for Blender, we like it very much. But it hard to say when we can do this

Btw, it's possible to run CentiLeo and Octane at the same time. Just launch 2 Interactive Previews and they should work. I have tested this around a year ago and it was going without crashes.
As for Redshift there were problems on their side. RS didn't like when one other renderer is working at the same time in the same Cinema 4D launch, either Octane or CentiLeo. But this was true in the past and I don't know if anything changes until now.

Hi Raphael and welcome to our forum!

It's a coinsidence I was watching just yesterday on your FB page the charts about Octane speed evolution for different versions starting from 3.08 and up until now. Thanks for this valuable information that makes me more calm

In fact I become curious about what's going on with the subject question. In the past I was working for this not to happen when the renderer itself is not doing anything. Even if you don't launch it but tune CentiLeo materials with their preview performing some activity then it would take around 100Mb.

One explanation is that modern GPU driver may take some resources on the first call to get the list of available GPUs and then reserve this for some reason.
I will check this. In my case the the RTX 3080 reports only around 7.5GB when I just launch Cinema 4D without CentiLeo. I thought it is some OS memory reduction.

Btw, I am currently filling the manual page for C4D plugin and you may see it here
https://centileo.com/docs/index.php?COURSE_ID=3&CHAPTER_ID=069&LESSON_PATH=17.69

Kirill

If you want to create the gradient from bottom to top of the object without using texture UVW mapping then the receipe would be the following:
1) create the uvwProjection node with XYZ projection method
2) create Pattern node with linearY pattern type and connect uvwProjection to Pattern.inputUVW. This way you will get greyscale gradient.
3) create Ramp node as you did and connect the former node output to it's input map.

As for glass material you may attach the resulting node to Transmission Color or Absorption Color. Also you may variate the absorption distance with a texture

It shouldn't! In a couple of my tests the latest release was around few percent faster. But your example would be welcome (with a scene) to see what's going on there

Thanks for sharing!

Hi, its probably not enough number of ray bounces. Or something to do with nested dielectrics where you may control it using "Is Liquid" checkbox in the Transmission channel of material.

I recommend yo download new CentiLeo 0.66 which now supports Chinese Interface for node materials
https://centileo.com/news/162/centileo-for-cinema-3dsmax-0660/

Yes, certainly we can accelerate even more using the code optimizations, some algorithm & sampling improvements and also using image adaptive sampling as you mention. As for image adaptive sampling I hope to make it in 0.68 release which should be released somewhere in the summer. This will be very cool further speedup.

Yes, the forum was unfairly ignored by people, but in fact we didn't push promotion because needed to develop & bugfix more precisely. Anyway there are good conversatiions in the messengers.
FP will be supported for sure, and I think we will see it in the middle of this year.

The next version of CentiLeo plugin for 3ds Max will get very important update: a denoiser and material converter from main 3ds Max shaders (from General category), Corona and Fstorm. And this will be released in the coming days.

Hi sel, welcome to CentiLeo! And thanks a lot for attempt to make a converter!
Good news is that I am working on this at the moment and it will be a C++ converter, that means that it will be able not only to convert into CentiLeo shader nodes, but also to use existing nodes directly in CentiLeo. We will try to support as much as possible from Cinema native nodes and Octane, and maybe more. And there will be iterations to refine the precision of shader conversion.
For example the similar job is made for our 3ds Max plugin and it will be released soon. And now started to do it for C4D, hope it goes rapidly.

Hi Fabiano and welcome to our forum! As for animated bitmaps/textures - they are not supported, but the alpha channel of CentiLeo material is the slot to attach any alpha/opacity maps.

Certainly 32 iterations (2048 samples per pixel) are not always needed. That's why some experiment on user side is needed. With denoiser that can be modified in IPR in post effects settings this is even simpler (to be released in 0.66). But further we want to make an automatic render stop for regions that are already resolved, we will do this in some near future.

A good practice to send a scene somewhere else is to save with assets option. It will save the scene to the specified folder and will send all the referenced textures there too and will change the links in the bitmaps. Also it's good to transfer the scene without "*.cntx" files and you do so.

Quote
ssjenforcer wrote: It seemed like it was fully rendered in just a few iterations, and even though I let it go all the way to 32--which took like 10 minutes--it did not seem to get any clearer.

Sometimes 32 iteratios are not needed, sometimes the lighting is very simple and some low amount of iterations make it ready in fact. But "not getting clearer"... how do you compare?
New version will get Nvidia OptiX denoiser that can be changed in post production settings for PV and IPR, very usefull thing.