This is a video by Ali demonstrating work in progress related to material converter script to CentiLeo:

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dong w wrote: Software could not be started

Hi Dong,

Welcome to our board! What GPUs are there in the system? It worked with NVIDIA GPUs with at least 2GB memory.
Have you updated the NVIDIA display drivers to the latest one?
Have you any one AMD GPU in the system?

Can you start Cinema 4D with copied plugin?
Or CentiLeo just does'nt start inside loaded Cinema?

I see that ASAP we need to add Camera Tag with individual DOF and post processing properties which override the global settings

Updated the first post, because we have updated the User Manual for 0.44:
http://centileo.com/bitrix/components/bitrix/forum.interface/show_file.php?fid=336&action=download

The list of changes of manual for cntlc4d 0.44 alpha:

1) Added in Section 3: Special note on GPU memory consumption
2) Added in Section 6: Tab Render Parameters -> Firefly killer parameter has no effect
3) Added in Section 6: Tab IPR
4) Updated (a lot) Section 8: "Materials and Shaders behavior"
5) Updated Section 10: "Interactive Preview Rendering (IPR)"

Tiago, I have checked: well by saying "directional" light I was meaning "Infinite" light (of Cinema). To tune it's parameters you need to add our cntlTagLight. Spot, Area, Omni, Infinite - they work.
In our cntlLightTag there are 2 parameters: "scale area" and "scale angle". The first one scales the area of light source surface (this is valid for Omni (becomes a sphere), Spot and Area light). The second parameter changes the directional angle of light (valid for Spot and Directional light). Both params have effect only in renderer output (not yet in viewport).
As for Parallel, Parallel Spot, Square Parallel Spot, IES - they don't work yet. IES is important, so need to make it.

And please don't forget to post your WIPs here so we can visually see where to change the engine to make better performance and integration.

Hi Tiago and welcome to our board! Nice images!

Well, mesh light will come slightly later, however I like this feature a lot. But next few versions will contain multi-GPU, faster multi-lights, light pass blender (aka light mixer) and some improvements for displacement tesselator. We simply come very close to these features, they are partially done. I hope, this is not too long to wait for them.
And then there will be mesh lights, physical sun & sky. Mesh lights should be done via texturing, so that some part of polygon is emissive and another part is reflective.
Btw, currently the native Cinema Sun tag is translated and it determines the directional light based on the used time.

Hello everyone!

We have released CentiLeo 0.44 for 3ds Max 2014-2017.

Download link: http://centileo.com/forum/forum13/85-download-link-centileo-for-3ds-max-v044-alpha-bugfixes

Shaderball scene: http://centileo.com/bitrix/components/bitrix/forum.interface/show_file.php?fid=322&action=download

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: http://centileo.com/forum/messages/forum13/message307/85-download-link-centileo-for-3ds-max-v0441-al...

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.

Ok, my guess was right about Post Effects setting. Will need to look at this again and debug untill the images in PV and IPR match for every case.

Hi Aimar,

We have originally designed the system in such a way that it uses 3 buffers (see bottom line of status info in IPR window):

1) buffer for rays - it uses between 512 and 1024 MB which is computed automatically based on available GPU memory (this is needed for out-of-core geometry engine and powerfull pipeline processing. This thing has a lot of advantages (out-of-core geometry, more flexible and efficient mapping of graphics features to GPU, it has huge potential to be extended with very advanced future features). The dissadvantage is that it takes this up to 1GB of mem (but no more) which is quite influential on small GPUs with 2GB only. However the trend is that new generation low-end GPUs will have 4GBs (1050ti) and 2GB (for just 1050).

2) geo cache GPU - this can be tuned by user in HW settings. And in multi-GPU setup the first iteration of implementation will have one setting for all selected GPUs. And later we will probably make it a setting for each GPU if this will not complicate the usage. If the scene is large and doesn't fit to GPU memory then the more you allocate here the faster the renderer is (slightly). However, the influence is not very pathalogical here. It should not deaccelerate too much for very out-of-core scenes. Your scenes just have to fit in main RAM.

3) tex cache GPU - same history for textures. They are implemented even more efficient than geometry. I think that something less than 1GB is ok here almost always. There is also a cache size setting for RAM memory which is uses for textures. For instance you may have 32GB RAM and 60 GB of textures in total. All textures are stored on disc in unpacked format. A convenient thing is that you need just few GB of cache for textures in RAM and don't to pollute the whole RAM. But the disc is polluted with all that *.mml files. I believe, that discs are much larger and cheaper than RAM anyway

So, as you see we have designed the system focusing on big scenes with stress situation.
However, when people start testing it with basic scenes the questions emerge. For example, if there is only single GPU in the system then it can be not nice to grab all memory from it. But we take only allocatable memory and don't exceed the memory limits.

Anyway thanks for pointing to this thing. I think it is possible to make some changes in the future, so that geometry/texture caches will be auto-extended only on demand by the amount that is necessary for scene up to specified limits in HW settings. Right now it's all controlled by manual input.

Btw, this new feature of inter-material copy-paste for textures creates the foundation for node-based material editor. What we need is to map things to GUI. It is planned to be done later after core improvements.

Hi Aimar, this is related to gamma settings.

Does this happen when you render in IPR and then click the top-left button to transfer it to PV? Does this happen when you just render in PV only?
Cinema 4D changes the gamma of rendered image in PV based on own settings in Output or Save tab. I haven't yet checked all their laws regarding this, so now such things still may happen

E.g. sometimes when Cinema4D enables Post Effects then Cinema 4D doesn't change the gamma which is applied in PV. If Post Effects not enabled then Cinema 4D changes the gamma by 2.2
However you can make gamma correction: it can be changed in CentiLeo render settings in Post production tab in order to get required gamma in PV (just test values 0.45, 1 or 2.2). Alternativelly it can be changed in PV in Filter settings.

Will fix this in future releases.

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Rodrigo Birtencourt Rodrigues wrote: nice!!! im very happy with this render engine! keep the good work! please make a web gallery to show some Centileo renderings, will be nice too

Thanks! There will be a gallery in a couple of weeks. There should be also few video demos and tutorials.
Right now we are concentrated on several features and also need to fix displacements issues.

Hello everyone!

We have released CentiLeo for Cinema 4D 0.44 alpha

Download CentiLeo (need registration): http://centileo.com/forum/forum18/82-download-link-centileo-for-cinema-4d-v044-alpha

Download shaderball: http://centileo.com/bitrix/components/bitrix/forum.interface/show_file.php?fid=326&action=download

User manual updated fro 0.44: User Manual - cntlc4d-0.44alpha_en.pdf (2.17 Mb)

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

Hi Ali, thanks a lot! We will try to implement requested features asap

This is done. Once I will finish with copy-paste of shaders (also copy as instance) across several materials then will commit 0.44 here.

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Rodrigo Birtencourt Rodrigues wrote: yes, but... i have 4 nvidia cards... by default it is always in my main card... its not what I want... I have to change it in all documents... No way to have something more customizable in the C4D prefs?( its a suggestion, because if it run in my main card the system have a overload and no optimized performance in Centileo IPR so... main gpu to my viewport and my second gpu to centileo IPR. it by default will be awesome!)

Ok, I got it. If there are secondary GPUs of the power not less than the main one then they should be selected by default.

We are preparing the multi-GPU feature. It will be ready in a couple of new versions.

Have you noticed that when the main (display) GPU has larger allocated cache (for geometry/textures) then IPR may slow down. When main GPU has lower allocated memory it may run faster. With secondary GPUs it's all much better. Sometimes 3-4x better.

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Rodrigo Birtencourt Rodrigues wrote: will be nice to have an option to it

This setting is saved when you click Apply and then Save the scene. And when reopen the scene the previously selected GPU is selected also.

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Rodrigo Birtencourt Rodrigues wrote: Centileo have an option to link Cinema Camera properties like DOF and others properties to Centileo?a tag maybe? sorry my poor english

Hello Rodrigo, welcome to our board! Your English is cool! Many people in US speak it worse.

No yet, there is no yet any specialized tag for each camera object to make different properties and then switch them easilly. It was asked before, we will do it soon (right now we are busy on shader/texture copy-past across different materials of document).

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Aimar NL_21 wrote: Quote Kirgman wrote: Maybe it would be better to create an option with checkbox where user can determine to work as now or to work with full scene reload when PV is explicitly started. What do you think? in IPR good idea (If I understand your point correctly) . In my opinion adding object tag (subdivision) like other render engine can be better option .

ok, will do a special object tag like in other engine and implement this visibility option from Cinema native property

Hello muthukumaran A, welcome here!
Yes, it is missing, but we also want light pass realime blender, improve displacements, return motion blur back ASAP