A lot of time passed since releasing CentiLeo 0.42 for Max and Cinema. And I fell we need to post how the work on the next version is going.
The next version 0.43 is still in progress because too many things have been started for it. Some of them are quite large.
The most time consuming part is multi-GPU implementation. As soon as it's implemented we will publish the new version. It may take few days or even one week more.
So far we have already implemented:
1) Transition to CUDA 8. Now the renderer should work on Pascal NVIDIA GPUs (but we need testers for that). A wonderful thing is that even on my old GTX 970 the renderer works 12% faster with new CUDA. This new CUDA has also fixed some bugs that could touch the renderer.
2) Faster image convergence when portals are used. Not yet measured how much faster.
3) Fluent GUI responce when heavy render computations are processed by CentiLeo IPR. This is true for both 3ds Max and Cinema 4D. This is now much more pleasant to work with it.
4) More AOVs (reflection layers, base, transmission) that can be summed into beauty image. And AOV with beauty+alpha and alpha as mask.
5) 30-50% speedup when rendering large resolution images like 4K or even 10K. The speedup is better when there are a couple of AOVs computed in parallel and the image resolution is larger.
6) Fixed the bug with texture resolution downscaling for environment map visible through the glass material.
7) More bugfixes for CentiLeo in 3ds Max plugin (lile no crash with Max physical camera and Undo/Redo for materials and lights).
More bugfixes for CentiLeo in Cinema 4D (a couple of crashes and unnecessary IPR restarts were fixed).
What is still in progress:
1) General image convergence improvement when materials with several layers are used (almost done).
2) Material GUI improvements in CentiLeo for Cinema 4D (in the middle).
3) Multi-GPU (in the middle).
4) More bugfixes for small GPUs like 2GB which I talked about. Sometimes you have 2GB labeled on the GPU but in reality the OS may give you around 1GB (less than in the middle).
5) Will highly likely switch the layer organization of cntlStdMat to additive mode by default (when you tune the weights of each layer relative to each other). And there should be no confusion with stack-based priority. Will add optional checkboxes to enable old feature for material reflection layers where it is usefull.
Most time consuming things were performance improvements and now is multi-GPU. If multi-GPU will take even more time then we will wrap up what is done and release. In this case multi-GPU will be done for 0.44. Btw, for 0.44 we plan to accelerate renderer for scenes with many light sources (there are very promissing early experiments).
After finalizing 0.43 we will split the work so that new alpha versions will come much more frequent. New versions should be produced at least once or sometimes twice per week.
