This is the update CentiLeo 0.492 for 3ds Max 2014-2017! Shadow catcher is improved. Some more AOVs and light visibility properties are added. Important fixes for proxy files, hidden object accounting and problems with very high res bitmaps.
Download here:
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.492 alpha (2017 June 19)
[core] Improved Shadow Catcher and fixed relevant direct shadow bugs. Now you can control the strength of shadow for each light source or HDR environment map without affecting/overburning the other layers and other (non-shadow-catcher) objects. E.g. you can setup a separate environment map for shadow catcher. Since now to enable Shadow Catcher you should enable the checkbox in material settings (it will work as diffuse component, you can also add custom reflections for shadow catcher material, secondary GI is also rendered on shadow catcher).
[core] Sampling high-contrast HDR environment maps is improved 20% (less noise).
[core] Fixed issue with quite large overall brightness difference when render with or without portals
[core] Fixed Alpha-channel AOV
[core] Added Translucency, SSS AOVs
[core] Added Static Noise pattern option. It is used to get either static noise pattern when rendering animation or dynamic (when unchecked) to be used in 3rd party post denoisers.
[core] Fixed wrong blur (artifact) with bucket borders for very high-res bitmaps.
[core] Fixed IPR scene parser slowdown (when user moves objects interactively) in case of many GPUs.
[core] Fixed problem with incomplete shadow length in some IPR scenarios.
[core] Fixed problem with incomplete shadow length in some IPR scenarios.
[core] Improved IPR render performance in case of multi-GPU where display GPU also participates.
[cntlmax] Fixed Proxy CentiLeo object exporting to files and replacing for original objects and now it also understands native 3ds Max instancing.
[cntlmax] Fixed handling of hidden objects in 3ds Max scene for IPR.
[cntlmax] Fixed bug with changing CPU texture cache size.
[cntlmax] Added Target on/off for CentiLeo Light (former CentiLeo Uber Light object).
[cntlmax] Added more light visibility parameters per layer with arbitrary value range.
Known issues to be solved
- If you have several GPUs in computer it’s not recommended to assign the display-GPU for rendering. Sometimes is causes strange behavior. Currently we are trying to fix it.
- Displacement mapping feature is deactivated due to large code changes overall. This feature will be recovered within the next few short CentiLeo updates.
- May not initialize if AMD GPU is in your computer together with NVIDIA GPU.
- Very limited scene converter tool from other renderers (only diffuse property and textures from Standard material and Vray material)
- UVW mapping change of parameters may not be accounted by IPR scene auto update mode. To be solved.
- May not support non-latin texture paths.
- Need to finish implementing integration with ForestPack/RailClone/MultiScatter
Make you test and please give a feedback to make it even better!
For next update we plan to make RandomShader, RandomBitmap and interactive responce for 3rd party scatter plugins.
Roadmap update for 0.55-0.61 releases (approximatelly):
1) Displacement Mapping.
2) Mesh Lights.
3) Shaders/textures: more types of procedural noise, curve map, gradient, procedural UV mappings.
4) Fix some problems for scenes where CentiLeo is not so fast.
5) Node based visual editor for materials and shaders for CentiLeo in Cinema 4D.
6) More post-production settings and higher quality tonemapping.
7) Documentation update.
8) ForestPack, RailClone и MultiScatter for 3ds Max. Want to make it working well with IPR.
All these things may stretch for 7 releases 0.55-0.61. They are very important since they can influence to the rendering core engineering (I mean #1-4).
After that there will be a run on other easy-to-do features.
Edited: - Dec 25, 2017 03:43(Updated roadmap for 0.55-0.61)
CentiLeo Chat:
CentiLeo for Cinema 4D 0.491 available (improved shadow catcher and bug fixes)
CentiLeo 0.49 for Cinema 4D R16-R18 is ready! It has improved shadow catcher with very nice controls which can easilly change the strength of the shadow per light on shadow catcher materials. Few other things are also improved.
IPR reaction become more clever and doesn't reset when not needed! Hope there are no bugs anymore like Rodrigo found for 0.48X
We have started transiting for tighter intergration with C4D. We are currently working on Alpha-channel for Material that will allow to blend several materials simply adding them to the Tag line. The part of solution is here (not yet visible for user, but hope it doesn't cause the bugs). Hope that in 0.50 we will finilze the alpha-channel for material.
Download here:
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.490 alpha (2017 May 23)
[core] Improved Shadow Catcher and fixed relevant direct shadow bugs. Now you can control the strength of shadow for each light source or HDR environment map using the dedicated multiplier parameter without affecting/overburning the other layers and other (non-shadow-catcher) objects. Since now to enable Shadow Catcher you should enable the checkbox in material settings (it will work as diffuse component, you can also add custom reflections for shadow catcher material, secondary GI is also rendered on shadow catcher).
[core] Sampling high-contrast HDR environment maps is improved 20% (less noise).
[core] Fixed issue with quite large overall brightness difference when render with or without portals
[core] Fixed Alpha-channel AOV
[core] Added Translucency, SSS AOVs
[C4D plugin] Improved IPR reaction for changing objects, camera and ALL parameters. It updates WHILE are you doing the changes (not AFTER you did changes like before). This comes true after fixing bugs from 0.48.
[C4D plugin] Fixed bug with right-to-left material tag ordering for procedural (non-polygon) objects.
[C4D plugin] Added white-balance control for each light pass post-process changing (see Render Settings -> AOV tab).
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.491 alpha (2017 June 12)
[core] Added Static Noise pattern option. It is used to get either static noise pattern when rendering animation or dynamic (when unchecked) to be used in 3rd party post denoisers.
[core] Fixed wrong blur (artifact) with bucket borders for very high-res bitmaps – was fixing it for long time.
[core] Fixed broken (in 0.490) noise-aware rendering.
[core] Fixed IPR scene parser slowdown (when user moves objects interactively) in case of many GPUs.
[core] Fixed problem with incomplete shadow length in some IPR scenarios.
[C4D plugin] Fixed wrong geometry parsing for deformed C4D Instance Object.
[C4D plugin] From now on in order to save renderer memory for same geometry objects you should use C4D Instance Object with “Render Instance” flag turned ON. In previous versions to get instancing memory saving it was not needed to switch this flag on.
[C4D plugin] Fixed wrong handling of object on/off visibility
[C4D plugin] Fixed IPR window freeze when C4D window is switched to Bodypaint or any other layout.
Please test it and give us feedback to discover further improvements!
Best regards,
Kirgman
Edited: - Jun 12, 2017 21:11(Update to 0.491 with fixes)
CentiLeo Chat:
CentiLeo for 3ds Max 0.483 available (multi-GPU and efficiency improvement)
Also publishing CentiLeo 0.483 for 3ds Max 2014-2017 like for C4D week ago!
Sorry, it took very long unexpected time, but it required to do so many little things in a complex system and many times the ongoing release was postponed. But now it's ready!
CentiLeo 0.48 release is mostly about multi-GPU and other efficiency improvements for rendering and memory management. Graphics feature improvements (more shaders, AOVs, improved shadow catcher, motion blur and mesh lights) are expected in the nearest alpha releases which will come out few times per month.
Download here:
Shaderball scene:
Light lister script by Ali Kavyani:
Change Log: cntlmax 0.483 alpha (2017 May 10)
[core] Multi-GPU support (maximum 16) with adaptive render data and cache arrangement on GPUs with different memory size. It scales 1.9-2.75x for 2-3x GPUs
[core] Up to 50% improved GI sampling for scenes with harder lighting. Sampling becomes smarter at the cost of more complex computations. For scenes with more or less interesting lighting (interiors, exteriors with several CG lights and/or complex HDRs) it gives up to 50% faster rendering. But for scenes with simple lighting (e.g. outdoor with single area light or simple HDR) where new smart sampling is too smart the rendering is 15-25% slower due to more complex computations compared CentiLeo 0.47.
[core] Solved render initialization problem that decreased render speed in CentiLeo 0.47 by 2x until user manually plays with cache sizes. This solution converts to 2x faster render for production mode and for those who didn’t bother with cache size manipulation.
[core] 2.5x faster scene parsing for complex geometry (when render data is initialized and recompiled in IPR mode).
[core] A lot more fluent IPR experience when camera or post-process settings or other scene data are changed. 3D app viewport doesn’t lag as before. IPR responses real-time for simple data changes (like camera motion, post-effects, object motion or material changes) while user continues moving the UI slider params.
[core] Around 40% less memory needed for geometry storage. Now we pack 25M unique non-instanced triangles (with 1 UV channel, normal and tangent vectors) in 1GB. Wider range of highpoly scenes become less out-of-cory.
[core] 30% faster rendering for scenes with out-of-core geometry (and this accel adds on top of mentioned geometry memory savings).
[core] Up to 4 UV channels supported for each geometry mesh (selectable in mapping slots of shaders).
[core] Material editor preview: much faster and nicer preview render.
[core] Each GPU is initialized with as much memory as needed by scene (unlike taking all free memory even for trivial scenes in CentiLeo 0.47).
[core] Render stop criterion is now driven by min/max number of image iterations and also noise level. If the pixel gets at least min iterations and the noise level matches the user defined noise level then the render will not revisit this pixel anymore. Noise detection becomes more conservative and robust now.
[core] Added roughness parameter for Diffuse channel of material (it also hides shadow terminator artifacts on low-poly objects if any).
[cntlmax] Slight reorganization of Material editor GUI (all SSS are placed in one tab, Translucency is also placed in a separate tab).
Known issues to be solved soon
- If you have several GPUs in computer it’s not recommended to assign the display-GPU for rendering. Sometimes is causes strange behavior. Currently we are trying to fix it.
- Displacement mapping feature is deactivated due to large code changes overall. This feature will be recovered within the next few short CentiLeo updates.
- May not initialize if AMD GPU is in your computer together with NVIDIA GPU.
- Very limited scene converter tool from other renderers (only diffuse property and textures from Standard material and Vray material)
- UVW mapping change of parameters may not be accounted by IPR scene auto update mode. To be solved.
- May not support non-latin texture paths.
- Need to finish implementing integration with ForestPack/RailClone/MultiScatter
Enjoy rendering with CentiLeo and share your opinion!
Kirgman
CentiLeo Chat:
CentiLeo for Cinema 4D 0.483 available (multi-GPU and efficiency improvement), test description message
We finally made CentiLeo 0.48 for Cinema 4D R16-R18! It took so long time, so many efforts. Sorry for very long waiting! We thought were close to release for the last 2.5 months but technical development issues emerged and forced us to do more complex solutions to get right result. And that cycle happened several times. This 0.48 version development was harder than integrating with C4D or 3ds Max .
CentiLeo 0.48 release is mostly about multi-GPU and other efficiency improvements for rendering and memory management. Graphics feature improvements (more shaders, AOVs, improved shadow catcher, motion blur and mesh lights) are expected in the nearest alpha releases which will come out few times per month.
Download here:
Download shaderball:
User manual from 0.44 (yes it needs update):
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.480 alpha (2017 May 2)
[core] Multi-GPU support (maximum 16) with adaptive render data and cache arrangement on GPUs with different memory size. It scales 1.9-2.75x for 2-3x GPUs
[core] Up to 50% improved GI sampling for scenes with harder lighting. Sampling becomes smarter at the cost of more complex computations. For scenes with more or less interesting lighting (interiors, exteriors with several CG lights and/or complex HDRs) it gives up to 50% faster rendering. But for scenes with simple lighting (e.g. outdoor with single area light or simple HDR) where new smart sampling is too smart the rendering is 15-25% slower due to more complex computations compared CentiLeo 0.47.
[core] Solved render initialization problem that decreased render speed in CentiLeo 0.47 by 2x until user manually plays with cache sizes. This solution converts to 2x faster render for production mode and for those who didn’t bother with cache size manipulation.
[core] 2.5x faster scene parsing for complex geometry (when render data is initialized and recompiled in IPR mode).
[core] A lot more fluent IPR experience when camera or post-process settings or other scene data are changed. 3D app viewport doesn’t lag as before. IPR responses real-time for simple data changes (like camera motion, post-effects, object motion or material changes) while user continues moving the UI slider params.
[core] Around 40% less memory needed for geometry storage. Now we pack 25M unique non-instanced triangles (with 1 UV channel, normal and tangent vectors) in 1GB. Wider range of highpoly scenes become less out-of-cory.
[core] 30% faster rendering for scenes with out-of-core geometry (and this accel adds on top of mentioned geometry memory savings).
[core] Up to 4 UV channels supported for each geometry mesh (selectable in mapping slots of shaders).
[core] Material editor preview: much faster and nicer preview render. [core] Each GPU is initialized with as much memory as needed by scene (unlike taking all free memory even for trivial scenes in CentiLeo 0.47).
[core] Render stop criterion is now driven by min/max number of image iterations and also noise level. If the pixel gets at least min iterations and the noise level matches the user defined noise level then the render will not revisit this pixel anymore. Noise detection becomes more conservative and robust now.
[core] Added roughness parameter for Diffuse channel of material (it also hides shadow terminator artifacts on low-poly objects if any).
[C4D plugin] Improved render time in native Picture Viewer mode by updating secondary AOV output less frequently.
[C4D plugin] Slight reorganization of Material editor GUI (all SSS are placed in one tab, Translucency is also placed in a separate tab).
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.481 alpha (2017 May 3)
[core] Fixed bug when one of several GPUs may randomly avoid participating in collective rendering
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.482 alpha (2017 May 4)
[core] Fixed bug when changing any Mix parameter of material (or any parameter which has no effect ) may cause render degradation and crash.
[core] Fixed bug when switching between materials (and/or removing them) may cause render stop.
[core] Fixed bug with artifacts related to wrong smooth normals of mesh.
[core] Fixed bug with artifacts on anisotropic reflections.
[core] Fixed bug when material tangent space doesn’t really change when user enables it.
[C4D plugin] Added Sun item to main CentiLeo menu which adds sun with proper tags understandable by CentiLeo.
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.483 alpha (2017 May 10)
[core] Fixed bug with missing polygons on small objects like plane.
[C4D plugin] Fixed bug with render stop upon deletion of material tag.
[C4D plugin] Fixed bug with IPR random wrong parsing of objects and render freezes.
Known issues to be solved
- If you have several GPUs in computer it’s not recommended to assign the display-GPU for rendering. Sometimes is causes strange behavior. Currently we are trying to fix it.
- Displacement mapping feature is deactivated due to large code changes overall. This feature will be recovered within the next few short CentiLeo updates.
- Sometimes GUI of IPR window may have old style controls.
- May not initialize if AMD GPU is in your computer together with NVIDIA GPU.
- Very limited scene converter tool from Cinema 4D native materials (only diffuse color and texture are converted and translated if assigned to the object)
- May not support non-latin texture paths.
Enjoy rendering with CentiLeo again! And please shader experience related to multi-GPU behavior.
Kirgman
Edited: - Apr 26, 2020 05:35(Added info on update 0.483 (May 10, 2017))
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 0.47 alpha for 3ds Max 2014-2017 is available.
It has a lot of quality improvements. Post-processing contrast adds nice image feeling. While most work was spent for material behavior improvement and bugfixing. Really many things were polished in cntl std material.
Download here:
Recommendation to increase render speed:
Shaderball scene:
Light lister script by Ali Kavyani:
Change Log: cntlmax 0.471 alpha (2016 Dec 31)
[core] Improved render speed for scenes with many lights and rough reflections
[core] Improved render speed for bump mapping on polished surfaces (with roughness close to zero)
[core] Fixed fireflies in few situtations
[cntlmax] Fixed crash when click “View Image” in cntlTexture and go up. Change Log: cntlmax 0.470 alpha (2016 Dec 25)
[core] Added post-processing contrast setting. 0.5 by default, it makes the image more realistic
[core] cntlStdMaterial: glossyness usage as alternative to roughness (if checked then roughness is replaced with glossyness and treated accordingly).
[core] cntlStdMaterial: weight*color mixing mode similar to other engines
[core] cntlFalloff: parallel falloff mode
[core] Faster many-bounce internal reflections inside complex glass object.
[core] Roughness remapping. Now all the range 0..1 is more interesting unlike before when most interesting values were close to zero.
[core] Many bugfixes for material behavior when roughness is changed. Now the highlights are changing smoothly for small change of roughness.
[core] Fixes environment map brightness when seen through reflection
[cntlmax] Post-process can be performed when render is paused
Enjoy rendering with CentiLeo and share your opinion!
Kirgman
CentiLeo Chat:
CentiLeo for Cinema 4D 0.471 available (quality & materials improvement)
We did it for Catholic Christmas! Like a presen from Santa. Merry Christmas to those celebrating it today!
CentiLeo 0.47 alpha for Cinema 4D R16-R18 is available.
It has a lot of quality improvements. Post-processing contrast adds nice image feeling. While most work was spent for material behavior improvement and bugfixing. Really many things were polished in cntl std material.
Download here:
Recommendation to increase render speed:
Download shaderball:
User manual updated fro 0.44:
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.471 alpha (2016 Dec 31)
[core] Improved render speed for scenes with many lights and rough reflections
[core] Improved render speed for bump mapping on polished surfaces (with roughness close to zero)
[core] Fixed fireflies in few situtations
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.470 alpha (2016 Dec 24)
[core] Added post-processing contrast setting. 0.5 by default, it makes the image more realistic
[core] cntlStdMaterial: glossyness usage as alternative to roughness (if checked then roughness is replaced with glossyness and treated accordingly).
[core] cntlStdMaterial: weight*color mixing mode similar to other engines
[core] cntlFalloff: parallel falloff mode
[core] Faster many-bounce internal reflections inside complex glass object.
[core] Roughness remapping. Now all the range 0..1 is more interesting unlike before when most interesting values were close to zero.
[core] Many bugfixes for material behavior when roughness is changed. Now the highlights are changing smoothly for small change of roughness.
[core] Fixes environment map brightness when seen through reflection
[C4D plugin] Post-process can be performed when render is paused
[C4D plugin] Fixed crash when shader is attached to shader slot
[C4D plugin] Few bugfixes for animation recording (however some objects like spheres need to undergo the command “Current state to object”). This part of renderer will be soon improved even further.
Enjoy rendering with CentiLeo and tell you opinion!
Kirgman
CentiLeo Chat:
CentiLeo for Cinema 4D 0.462 available (few bugfixes)
Now CentiLeo 0.462 alpha for Cinema 4D R16-R18 is available.
Download here:
Recommendation to increase render speed:
Download shaderball:
User manual updated fro 0.44:
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.462 alpha (2016 Dec 16)
[core] Now the glass is created by setting only transmission.weight to 1 and you don’t
need to disable default Diffuse.weight to 0. According to new convention the weight of
transmission layer overrides diffuse. If you want to mix transmission and diffuse then you
should to make transmission weight less than 1. This is similar to other engines.
[core] Fixed incorrect glass rendering with IOR values larger than 1. And now it looks
much more beautiful.
[core] Fixed “black highlight” bug in subtle rough reflections.
[core] Fixed issue which caused slow render when there are many light sources with crazy
different areas and intensities.
[core] Added option “Contribute to only GI” to the light sources which helps to add more
indirect light to interiors without increasing the number of ray bounces. Increases the
speed of interior rendering, flicker-free, similar to portals accelerator for GI.
[C4D plugin] The camera (from CentiLeo menu) is created with position and orientation of
the current camera.
[C4D plugin] Default environment color is used if there are no any light sources in the
scene.
We have released CentiLeo 0.462 for 3ds Max 2014-2017.
Download link:
Recommendation to increase render speed:
Shaderball scene:
Light lister script by Ali Kavyani:
Change Log: cntlmax 0.462 alpha (2016 Dec 16)
[core] Fixed black highlights in some conditions.
[core] Fixed black borders for glass.
[core] Fixed missing reflection layer for mirrored meshes.
[core] Fixed issue which caused slow render when there are many light sources with crazy
different areas and intensities.
[core] Added option “Contribute to only GI” to the light sources which helps to add more
indirect light to interiors without increasing the number of ray bounces. Increases the
speed of interior rendering, flicker-free, similar to portals accelerator for GI.
[cntlmax] Added MultiScatter support (however not yet interactive, you need to press
“Reload Scene” button for changes to be reflected in IPR mode). This inconvenience will be
fixed soon.
[cntlmax] Added LightLister thanks to the efforts of Ali Kavyani. See download &
instructions thread:
Change Log: cntlmax 0.461 alpha (2016 Dec 11)
[core] Now the glass is created by setting only transmission.weight to 1 and you don’t need to disable default Diffuse.weight to 0. According to new convention the weight of transmission layer overrides diffuse. If you want to mix transmission and diffuse then you should to make transmission weight less than 1. This is similar to other engines.
[core] Fixed incorrect glass rendering with IOR values larger than 1. And now it looks much more beautiful.
[core] Fixed “black highlight” bug in subtle rough reflections.
Change Log: cntlmax 0.46 alpha (2016 Dec 8 )
[cntlmax] Substantially faster scene loader. Translated mesh normals are fixed too. The
speed improvements range from 4x (for 10M poly scene composed of 400 smooth meshes)
to 10x (for 40M poly scene composed of 2 meshes). E.g. now the 40M poly scene is loaded
to CentiLeo in 40 sec when you click “Start IPR”.
[cntlmax] The previous loader acceleration method has also reduced high RAM
consumption during loading of very big meshes (e.g. loading 40M poly scene can eat 14GB
RAM instead of 24GB RAM).
[cntlmax] UI improvement: Tab and keyboard arrow jumps in user interface of materials,
shaders and light sources.
[cntlmax] Fixed bug when material names are not saved.
[cntlmax] Fixed wrong shadow catcher environment map selection when it's seen through reflections.
Known issues to be solved in further versions :)
- No yet multi-GPU
- May not initialize if AMD GPU is in your computer together with NVIDIA GPU.
- Very limited scene converter tool from other renderers (only diffuse property and textures from Standard material and Vray material)
- UVW mapping change of parameters may not be accounted by IPR scene auto update mode. To be solved.
- Need to finish implementing integration with ForestPack/RailClone/MultiScatter
- May crash if in the same Max session you have rendered with Corona and then switched to CentiLeo IPR. Or vice versa: if you rendered in CentiLeo and then switched to Corona interactive.
We made some small demo about what happened for 0.45 version. It's available for Cinema 4D and 3ds Max.
Quick note: my artistic taste maybe not nice but the goal was to demonstrate the features Kirill is a pro-gram-mer!
Copy-paste video description from Youtube page:
This is the demo of CentiLeo Renderer new features 0.45 alpha update (features available for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D plugin both with interactive IPR). It supports fast rendering with many light sources and real-time adjustment of AOVs that are summed into the Beauty image. Inside "Blend Beauty pass" you can manipulate reflections, diffuse transmission, environment.
Inside "Blend Light pass" you an manipulate the light sources united into the groups called "passes". Each light pass is assigned in the special property of the light source.
Btw, take a look at how many creative look controls we have for the light source.
Also you may notice that the scene size is 8 GB (3GB geometry and 5GB textures) and it works very quickly on the single GTX 970 computing 15 AOVs in parallel (their resoltion doesn't matter, images are stored on CPU RAM during computation).
Anton Bessonov doesn't need special representation, he is really great 3D artist with the highest demands.
His page
Here are a couple of his WIP tests on detailed car model.
The first one was done in one of the earliest CentiLeo. The last picture was done with 0.452 for Max (1 minute for 2000x2000) on one GTX Titan straight out of the raw render.
So, he tried to make carpaint (see second picture) with some image of normal map flakes. I think we should make some procedural flakes shader for such tasks
CentiLeo Chat:
Recomendation to increase render speed and reduce lags
If you make this trick but in CentiLeo for Cinema then our renderer may perform 2x faster.
For example GTX970 works well when it is inited with GPU (geo+tex) cache less than 2GB. Then restart IPR closing and openning the IPR window again. And then while IPR is running you can up you caches more than 2GB: go to Hardware Settings, up the caches like you want and click "Apply". And it will have both good speed and larger caches which may be better for large scenes.
Sometimes GUI lags are possible when you render on the GPU which is also attached to your display. This happens because one GPU is shared among OS programs, Cinema viewport and CentiLeo.
But this trick may help eliminate these lags and run smooth even if you have one only GPU.
This thing has relation to CentiLeo's out-of-core feature and NVIDIA CUDA drivers which also compete for memory.
When we will work on multi-GPU feature we are going to make this process automatic so that you will have no headache with such tricks irrelevant to creativity. This is our aim!
PS: One more recommendation is to render on one or more GPUs that are not attached to display. And leave "display" GPU to the OS and viewport, it can be just some basic small GPU.
CentiLeo Chat:
CentiLeo for Cinema 4D 0.453 available (faster, many lights, light pass blender)
Now CentiLeo 0.452 alpha for Cinema 4D R16-R18 is available.
Download here:
Recommendations to reduce lags:
Download shaderball:
User manual updated fro 0.44:
Change Log: cntlc4d 0.453 alpha (2016 Dec 1)
[C4D plugin] Fixed non-working camera tag. [C4D plugin] Fixed a couple of negligible bugs. [C4D plugin] Reduced the frequency of IPR scene/camera update detector. [C4D plugin] At the moment the camera doesn’t update during motion, only after mouse button is up. After testing will return back the updater during motion [C4D plugin] Added a setting “IPR refresh time[ms]” in RenderSettings->IPR menu which is 100ms by default and it controls how often CentiLeo checks for updates of the scene. Change Log: cntlc4d 0.452 alpha (2016 Nov 30)
[core] Significantly better performance when there are many light sources in the scenes. You may notice better noise cleaning when there are more than 10 light sources. E.g. when there are 500 light sources in the scene then 0.45 may render 50x faster than 0.44.
[core] Special image AOV called “Blend light passes”. Recall that light passes can unite several light sources of the scene. When allocated in AOV rollout together with other light pass AOVs then you can change the brightness and color tint for each AOV in post without re-rendering. Currently these settings are only in render settings.
[core] Same post-process feature as above but with “Blend beauty passes”. When this AOV is enabled then you can mix beauty passes Environment, Reflections, Base, etc.
[core] The simple Visibility settings of light sources (with on/off state only) were changed to more flexible spinners with range 0..infinity and with additional color tint per each Visible material layer by individual light source.
[core] Shadow catcher as shader. Now you can attach the color of background to any color slot of material (for diffuse or say reflection) and it will work correctly. It also supports rendering to alpha channel of shadows from HDRI which are casted to the object with shadow catcher.
[core] Alpha channel with automatic black background rendering. To render beauty and light passes with alpha channel select corresponding checkbox in AOV rollout. When selected the alpha channel will be included and the background from non-background passes will be black (this avoids artifacts on the border of opaque object and background).
[core] Translucency slot for CentiLeo standard material (placed together with diffuse).
[core] IOR slot for each reflection layer of CentiLeo standard material.
[core] Fixed confusion when color doesn’t change in case of changing the weight of some material layer (of this is the only enabled layer of material).
[core] Advanced mixing mode for CentiLeo Multi-Material. Now each layer has the checkbox “is coat”. When it is selected then the current material coats on top of materials under it (it is old mode of CentiLeo 0.44). When this checkbox is not selected then the current material is evenly mixed with the underlying materials.
[core] Added multipliers for Direct Lighting, Direct Specular and Indirect Lighting components of the rendered image. They force re-rendering and affect all beauty and light pass AOVs.
[core] Fixed weird bump map and normal map bugs when they are scaled using cntlMath/Binary or cntlColorCorrection.
[core] Fixed a couple of bugs which could caused crashes.
[core] Fixed numeric bug which caused render convergence slowdown for HDR lighting with very bright region.
[IPR] Added 3 modes for the Region Render (play = start drawing render region, pause = fix current render region, stop = continue render the full image).
[IPR] Fixed bug with appearing strange black borders when Region Render is changed to full image render.
[C4D plugin] GUI lags – fixed. But it needs testing from all of you
[C4D plugin] Normalize light energy option for light tag asked by Tiago
[C4D plugin] Strength for bump slots
[C4D plugin] Fixed default/Visible modes for object visibility properties.
[C4D plugin] Fixed material inheritance in the hierarchy of objects
[C4D plugin] Per-camera dof settings and Post-processing settings via Camera tag
[C4D plugin] Fixed Bug Array.c4d reported by Aimar
[C4D plugin] Added CentiLeo menu asked by Rodrigo (however in top submenu)
[C4D plugin] Gamma in IPR and PV now is coinside and is controlled by gamma enabled in CentiLeo post-processing menu (or camera tag). You can disable it in "AOVs" menu to export only RAW HDR images to PV without post and CentiLeo gamma.
Long again, but a lot of work was done. And 3ds max plugin bug fixing which were in CentiLeo core have delayed Cinema plugin just to make it more robust.
We have released CentiLeo 0.45 for 3ds Max 2014-2017.
Download link:
Shaderball scene:
Please, read this changeloog. There are serious changes!
Change Log: cntlmax 0.452 alpha (2016 Nov 30)
[core] Fixed numeric bug which caused render convergence slowdown for HDR lighting
with very bright region.
Change Log: cntlmax 0.451 alpha (2016 Nov 29)
[cntlmax] fixed potential crash problems in Centileo material, IPR and Uber light source script data.
Change Log: cntlmax 0.45 alpha (2016 Nov 27)
[core] Significantly better performance when there are many light sources in the scenes. You may notice better noise cleaning when there are more than 10 light sources. E.g. when there are 500 light sources in the scene then 0.45 may render 50x faster than 0.44.
[core] Special image AOV called “Blend light passes”. Recall that light passes can unite several light sources of the scene. When allocated in AOV rollout together with other light pass AOVs then you can change the brightness and color tint for each AOV in post without re-rendering. Currently these settings are only in render settings.
[core] Same post-process feature as above but with “Blend beauty passes”. When this AOV is enabled then you can mix beauty passes Environment, Reflections, Base, etc.
[core] The simple Visibility settings of light sources (with on/off state only) were changed to more flexible spinners with range 0..infinity and with additional color tint per each Visible material layer by individual light source.
[core] Shadow catcher as shader. Now you can attach the color of background to any color slot of material (for diffuse or say reflection) and it will work correctly. It also supports rendering to alpha channel of shadows from HDRI which are casted to the object with shadow catcher.
[core] Alpha channel with automatic black background rendering. To render beauty and light passes with alpha channel select corresponding checkbox in AOV rollout. When selected the alpha channel will be included and the background from non-background passes will be black (this avoids artifacts on the border of opaque object and background).
[core] Translucency slot for CentiLeo standard material (placed together with diffuse).
[core] IOR slot for each reflection layer of CentiLeo standard material.
[core] Fixed confusion when color doesn’t change in case of changing the weight of some material layer (of this is the only enabled layer of material).
[core] Advanced mixing mode for CentiLeo Multi-Material. Now each layer has the checkbox “is coat”. When it is selected then the current material coats on top of materials under it (it is old mode of CentiLeo 0.44). When this checkbox is not selected then the current material is evenly mixed with the underlying materials.
[core] Added multipliers for Direct Lighting, Direct Specular and Indirect Lighting components of the rendered image. They force re-rendering and affect all beauty and light pass AOVs.
[core] Fixed weird bump map and normal map bugs when they are scaled using cntlMath/Binary or cntlColorCorrection.
[IPR] Added 3 modes for the Region Render (play = start drawing render region, pause = fix current render region, stop = continue render the full image).
[IPR] Fixed bug with appearing strange black borders when Region Render is changed to full image render.
[cntlmax] Less lags in 3ds Max GUI when IPR is running (needs more tests).
Note: the amount of lags was reduced so well that we recommend to up the IPR priority to 1 (in IPR settings rollout). This may increase samples/sec productivity of the IPR rendering. [cntlmax] Changed Standard CentiLeo Material GUI. Now the const values of the properties are tuned by spinners on the left side of material. The shader slots are on the right. Between them there are sliders which blend between the corresponding const value and shader evaluated value. This solution simply brings more functionality into the same GUI area.
[cntlmax] cntlNoise shader can now be rendered and manipulated in the 3ds Max viewport.
[cntlmax] Added button “Save current IPR image” to render settings. When IPR is running and is producing many AOVs at one time then this button may help saving all these images to the specified location at once.
[cntlmax] Fixed few other small bugs.
Known issues to be solved soon :)
- No yet multi-GPU
- May not initialize if AMD GPU is in your computer together with NVIDIA GPU.
- Very limited scene converter tool from other renderers (only diffuse property and textures from Standard material and Vray material)
- UVW mapping change of parameters may not be accounted by IPR scene auto update mode. To be solved.
- Need to finish implementing integration with ForestPack/RailClone/MultiScatter
Will post few comments and demos about this new update when will publish the update for CentiLeo to Cinema 4D (will be out soon, hope today).
For those curious in status of development of CentiLeo 0.45 we can report:
Done features:
1) "Light pass blender" and "Beauty pass blender" - these are 2 new AOVs wherein you can change the lighting based on scaling the light passes realtime without re-rendering. Similar to LightMixer of Corona and Multi-Light of Maxwell.
2) Visibility settings per light source now have not only checboxes (enabled/disabled light) but also the scale and color factors for each material layer. It simply gives more freedom.
3) Few improvements for GI solver. That our adaptive GI solver is now a little bit more clever attacking most noisy areas even earlier.
4) Each render iteration is around 10% faster.
5) Several bugfixes. Most recent is fixing scaling and combination issues inside the shaders for bump and normal maps.
6) Imrpoved the situation with lagging GUI when IPR is running.
7) Material GUI has now dedicated Reflection IOR (default 1.4)
8) Only CentiLeo for Max: changed material GUI adding Mix params between const and texture.
Yet to be finished:
1) Improve GI solver when there are a lot of light sources.
2) Want to automate this manual trick:
3) Shadow catcher.
4) Add that small few additions/fixes to plugins for 3ds Max and Cinema that were requested in respective 0.44 threads.
Working very hard to publish it soon. #3 and #4 are easy, but #1 and #2 may requre some effort.
Also want to say that adding support for Multi GPU and interactive ForestPack/RailClone/Multiscatter are postponed again and will go separate to this upcoming release because these features may change stability on the first release with them.
We have released CentiLeo 0.44 for 3ds Max 2014-2017.
Download link:
Shaderball scene:
Change Log: cntlmax 0.441 alpha (2016 Nov 16)
[cntlmax] Fixed crash of map preview (the reason was cntlRandom shader)
[cntlmax] Fixed some GUI lags when IPR is running (needs testing)
See here:
0.45 still under preparation, it has a lot of changes
This is a list of changes 0.44
[cntlmax] Fixed bug when old viewport wasn't locked in IPR when viewports are
switching (actually view angle was not locked).
[cntlmax] Fixed bug when environment map disappear from one of the slots of CentiLeo
Renderer settings. But now when open old scene the reset of render settings may be
required (not always): if something is strange please change selected renderer in main
settings to scanline and then back to CentiLeo again and then recreate Environment map
slots again.
[cntlmax] UV tiling of cntlTexture is now mapped same way as standard Bitmap which is
also supported
[cntlmax] Now cntlTexture supports all those image formats that are supported by 3ds
Max itself (FreeImage lib dependency is removed).
[cntlmax] 3rd party light sources are converted to CentiLeo uber-light and convert old
light instancing (this feature accelerates manual conversion process for light sources).
[cntlmax] cntlBlend has const values together with shader slots
[cntlmax] Resource collector for CentiLeo assets connected to the scene (currently
cntlTexture and cntlProxy)
[cntlmax] Checkbox “reflection as coat” for Reflections in cntlStdMat. If enabled then
reflection layer become more important especially at grazing angles when cntlFalloff is
attached
[cntlmax] cntlRandom shader (at input 10 shader slots that are selected randomly with
some random color variation)
[IPR] enable/disable render status info (mouse right-click)
Known issues to be solved soon
- No yet multi-GPU
- No yet supported camera projection shifts for vertical lines tuning.
- May not initialize if AMD GPU is in your computer together with NVIDIA GPU.
- Very limited scene converter tool from other renderers (only diffuse property and
textures from Standard material and Vray material)
- UVW mapping change of parameters may not be accounted by IPR scene auto update
mode. To be solved.
- Need to accelerate first-time scene load and full reload
- Unfortunatelly benchmark scene is not yet available.
As I already told in C4D branch we now work on some important improvements of the core:
1) improvements for scenes with many light sources,
2) multi-GPU support,
3) and I think that soon there will be also some post-processing multi-pass very nice features just in renderer.
Btw, Ali Kavyani suggested to add one more setting to Reflections (this is IOR) and we are going to implement it
We are looking for your tests and suggestions which will help us improve.
This is a small update with a few bugfixes and copy/paste feature for textures which can be done across different materials.
This is a list of changes
[C4D plugin] texture/shader copy-paste as instance across different materials.
[C4D plugin] Fix problems with texture paths using “preset…” using native Cinema 4D bitmap procedures.
[C4D plugin] Now cntlTexture supports all those image formats that are supported by Cinema 4D itself (FreeImage lib dependency is removed).
[C4D plugin] Checkbox “reflect as coat” in cntlStdMat (valuable for reflections at grazing angles)
[C4D plugin] Update camera position during interactive motion (in 0.43 IPR updated only when the motion was over)
[C4D plugin] Camera near/far clipping
[C4D plugin] Fixed standard object visibility settings
[C4D plugin] Fixed crash when picture viewer is stopped
[C4D plugin] Few cosmetic material GUI changes: Diffuse on top, Mix for roughness, etc.
[IPR] Enable/disable IPR status info
Known issues to be solved
- No yet multi-GPU
- Sometimes GUI of IPR window may have old style controls.
- May not initialize if AMD GPU is in your computer together with NVIDIA GPU.
- Very limited scene converter tool from Cinema 4D native materials (only diffuse color and texture are converted and translated if assigned to the object)
- May not support non-latin texture paths
- Need to update documentation and create examples
Please, test it and tell about the bugs.
We are currently working on multi-GPU and an algorithm which accelerating the scenes with many light sources.C
Edited: - Nov 6, 2016 20:47(Updated user manual added)
We have released CentiLeo 0.43 for 3ds Max 2014-2017.
Download link:
This long time we were working on performance, bugfixes, interface, stability and a couple of features. From now on we will divide the work better and release new versions with less delays.
This is a list of changes
[core] CUDA 8 support. NVIDIA Pascal GPUs should be supported.
[core] Reworked render algorithm. Now it is progressive/bucket which on the first render iteration shows the entire Beauty pass and for any subsequent render iteration it computes Beauty pass and all enabled AOVs in parallel using buckets.
[core] One render iteration (“Iter” in IPR) now means one render over entire image with guarantee that every pixel received several samples. Before 0.43 the single render iteration stochastically fired up to one million samples over entire image (and it could lead to significant noise for large resolution images). The new sampling layout of 0.43 which is automatic and adaptive leads to significant noise reduction.
[core] New AOVs: Environment, Reflection1, Reflection2, Base, Transmission, Emitters. Now up to 16 AOVs can be computed in one render process in parallel with negligible (<5%) compute overhead. All this works also in IPR mode same way.
[core] Alpha channel support added.
[core] 15% faster render iteration computation in general.
[core] 3x faster render convergence for image parts with materials with several enabled layers like: multi-material, reflections+diffuse, reflections+transmission, reflections+diffuse+SSS. For example: glass with reflections, glossy and carpaint implementations are rendered much faster.
[core] All layers of material (reflections, diffuse, transmission, SSS are combined based on weights that are relative to each other). So all the layers have equal rights inside material. Stack-based policy is removed.
[core] Faster render convergence for shadow regions (perceptually2x faster).
[core] Rendering large resolution images like 4K or 10K is 30-50% faster.
[core] Render limitations are introduced for robustness. They are indicated in IPR window. For example, smallest GPUs with 1.5-2GB memory support 30-50M polygons and 100K mesh instances. GPUs with 3-4GB+ memory support 250-400M polygons and 1M mesh instances. These limitations will be further pushed forward.
[core] Bugfix: now render can work with at least 896MB of provided GPU memory by OS/driver. This low memory budget may be available on 1.5-2GB GPUs attached to display. Switching off other GPU applications may increase available memory for renderer.
[core] Bugfix: now environment map not blurred if seen through the glass.
[core] Bugfix: now absorption renders correctly.
[core] Bugfix: fixed rare overflow problems with complex shadows.
[IPR] IPR priority is introduced (see in render settings -> IPR). Larger priority increases render speed (samples/sec indicator) but can make GUI lags. Lower priority decreases render speed by 10-20% but makes work with GUI much smoother.
[IPR] Separate render resolution setting for IPR (see render settings -> IPR).
[IPR] Render region support.
[IPR] Render pause/resume.
[IPR] Render camera lock.
[IPR] Render enable/disable automatic scene updates.
[IPR] Full scene reload button.
[cntlmax] Material layers (Reflections, Diffuse, SSS, Transmission) now can be unrolled or hidden.
[cntlmax] UBER-light source. Create single light source, several instances of it and then change it’s type (Area, Sphere, Spot, Directional) on the fly for all instances.
[cntlmax] cntlTexture shader now can be seen in Viewport too (if enabled).
[cntlmax] native Bitmap is translated by CentiLeo (however still limited, need to implement the functionality for Output parameters).
[cntlmax] Improved converter for 3rd party light sources (now understands instancing and more lights).
[cntlmax] Bugfix: substantially improved stability when Camera is updated while working in IPR.
[cntlmax] Bugfix: substantially improved stability when Environment is updated while working in IPR.
[cntlmax] Bugfix: debug console can be enabled from the Hardware Settings rollout.
Known issues to be solved
- No yet multi-GPU
- May not initialize if AMD GPU is in your computer together with NVIDIA GPU.
- Very limited scene converter tool from other renderers (only diffuse property and textures from Standard material and Vray material)
- UVW mapping change of parameters may not be accounted by IPR scene auto update mode. To be solved.
- Resource collector for CentiLeo shaders and proxies is under construction
- Multi Texture and cntlRandom shaders are under construction yet.
- Still need to integrate ForestPack and Multiscatter with IPR.
As some of you may know the texture system creates the cache files *.mml together with original textures.
Currently the recomendation is to use cntlTexture for your images.
Please, test it and say what you think! CentiLeo team
