RS references the vertex map tags from the nodes using the name strings. While we use tag ID in the same way as native C4D nodes that are used for Physical/Standard render

Yes, the enabled improtance sampling will certainly increase the render time but in many cases, especially when the light source shape is very complex geometry and it is has global lighting influence on the scene then it would generate much less noise but with more costly render iterations.

Hi thrimanakatha,
Nice cup, thanks for sharing! At first reading just a topic title I was thinking you wanted to report about the fireflies as part of render noise. But that's artistic thing.
Btw, have you done your light sources as mesh lights with emissive material or just with omni lights and spherical shape?
In case of real geometry + emissive material you may test on/off for importance sampling to get better speed. I think in this case it would be faster with importance sampling = off.

You should create and paint a vertex map tag in C4D for your object, then create a vertex map node in node material editor and assign it to any shader property you want.
This was discussed here https://centileo.com/forum/forum19/724-what-is-cid-tag-for-centileo_-it-does-not-seem-to-attach-to-o....

In vertex map node you only determine the tag ID, and then you assign all this material to one or more objects and for each object the speficied vertex map tag will be used if the tag is available.

Redshift uses the names of tags to link them, but CentiLeo and native Cinema 4D nodes use tag id from left to right. Thats all the difference

Vertex map has various usage. E.g. Realflow generates them for deformation motion blur as I described before.
You can also draw a vertex map for your object. And a tag will appear in the list of object tags.
You may draw several vertex maps and they will generate Vertex Map tag 0, Vertex Map tag 1, ... Vertex Map tag N, from left to right in the tag list of the object.

If you want to get vertex map values for your shaders you should just use the vertex map node and connect it to the field you like, for example to determine reflection color properties or material amount in the mix material. In the vertex map node you only choose the vertex map tag ID.

Same story with vertex color tag!

As for mograph tag then it's automatically created for Mograph objects, e.g. for Cloner with multi-instancing, for mograph matrix, etc. You only need to know how to manage the mograph to generate UVW and Color data inside this mograph tag. In CentiLeo this mograph info can be accessed using mograph info node.

I want to fix the issue in the new coming release, this shouldn't work like that. It can be either an internal ray epsilon computation failure. Or it can be related to smooth normals that we have per vertex because when we increase subdivision and smoothness the stupid artifact goes away. Funny thing, but I hope to fix that soon

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ron134 wrote: can you show me some pics for reference i am kinda lost

I hope these few pages may show some idea how shader nodes can be used:
https://centileo.com/news/149/centileo-for-cinema-0614/
https://centileo.com/news/145/centileo-for-cinema4d-0610/
https://centileo.com/news/127/centileo-for-cinema4d-0590/

You can drag&drop your images from windows explorer to node editor and CentiLeo bitmap will be auto-created. By default it uses texture projection determined by TextureTag of the object where material is assigned. However you can change it using uvwProjection node where you can either use a procedural texture mapping coordinates or reference one of UVW Tags that are assigned to your object.

Sure, we need to write a manual for shaders of CentiLeo because there are a lot of nice things that can be done. Also during shader writting I tried to follow the similar practice as native Cinema 4D nodes, so they can be somehow similar.
Do you want me to share a shader ball scene with some materials?

ssjenforcer, thanks for help to new user!

CID is an invisible tag that stores the unique ID of the scene object to leverage it in interactive rendering together with motion blur and optimize some dynamic object changes during edit.
This tag is automatically created for each object if you use CentiLeo. If you uninstall the plugin you will see these tags for all scene objects. And it's also visible in the list of options of tags - but this is a design of Cinema itself, not possible to remove it from that list.

This link shows how to use the vertex color tag: https://centileo.com/news/145/centileo-for-cinema4d-0610/ (see the bottom most picture)
While the vertex map tag can be used in a similar way. It's just a drawing on the surface of the object which stores the values in the vertex map tag. And the shader node for vertex map just gives you access to these values. You can reference up to 10 tags (and more in the new versions) that can be attached per object where tag id = 0 in the node reference the most left vertex map tag and so on.

Sometimes other plugins like Realflow use vertex maps to generate velocity values of deforming object. And these vertex map tags can be used by CentiLeo object tag to use deformation motion blur as described in this short example https://centileo.com/news/150/centileo-for-cinema-0615/

Actually this is the limitation of Cinema 4D itself that is not related to CentiLeo. The node space of one material doesn't intersect with another material node space, so you can't link one node material inside another node material. You have to copy-paste the necessary parts of nodes into another node material. This linking is possible in 3ds Max, but not in Cinema 4D.

For old style menu based materials I have made a workaround where the other scene materials can be referenced as links in the multi-material.
But in node space materials we have to copy-paste your created materials into another "collection" material node space where you will mix them using multi-material.
I hope that Maxon guys will integrate the "linking" field for nodes so we will be able to reference something from outside of this node.

But despite of this drawback in C4D there is also an interesting feature in Cinema 4D nodes. You can create your own assets using your settings that you create for glass, ice or leather or anything else and save as assets. These assets once saved will be available for the next launches of your Cinema 4D.
Also you can create complex node networks and unite them using the group node and for this group node you can build own input/output ports that will be shorter than for example the whole centileo std material 40 ports. And then reuse these saved groups for other projects and inside multi-materials.

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thrimanakatha wrote: Also the bitmap node can't reuse the imported textures. Converting a scene with different textures is time consuming.

Oh yes, I know this. This is a huge problem, and it slows down the adoption of CentiLeo for users. But we will fix this and make some material conversion tools next after we finish the current ongoing release.

That probably because in that old case there were 2 surfaces not a single like in a real plane.
This surface side node is based on the face normal, so it works only when we have one surface and can look at front and back side of it.

It's very simple to do. There should be a Mix Material which can combine two materials Primary and Secondary. There is also a port Primary Amount. So you should connect CentiLeo Surface Side node to this "Primary Amount" port.
After that Primary become Front and Secondary become Back material.

Thanks for files to thrimanakatha, ssjenforcer
Working to fix the issue. At the moment I have found that if the object is tesselated (more polygons) more the artifact goes away. For example adding subdiv removes the artifact. But I need to fix it without this workaround.

If you use CentiLeo node materials then each material has several layers: Reflection1, Reflection2, Transmission, Diffuse, SSS, Translucent, Alpha. Each layer has it's own paramers such as weight, color and roughness, ior and others. Additionally there is a tab called "Inputs" it has the list of all material layers that you can enable/disable with a flag. This is a standard thing as in C4D native materials.
If you use Menu based old style CentiLeo materials (in Cinema 4D older than R21) then there is a tab called "Basic" where you can enable/disable all material layers.

No yet, there are plans to make a library of materials. However, current material engine is pretty much similar to C4D native or Corona or Octane. Same values of material parameters produce the similar result

Hi ron134,
To get rid of noise that you call grainy you have to increase the number of render iterations in CentiLeo render settings.
Also CentiLeo uses own materials (CentiLeo material and all sorts of textures/shaders). And it uses Cinema 4D light sources as the base but they need to be connected with CentiLeo light tags that extend the base light source with several extra settings available for CentiLeo.
Sure we need to launch a complete documenation about the software, we will do it after finishing the next technical release

thrimanakatha, can you send me this scene file with HDR please?

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thrimanakatha wrote: 1. I did a test with a sphere with a glass material applied to the front half and diffuse material to the back half. Placed a cube inside the sphere and rendered. The GI flickering is there, so the geometry is not causing the issue. 2. Added thickness by extruding the sphere, the issue is still there.

Interesting finding! Can you please give me this scene for test? I am very curious. What was animated there? A camera?

Thanks for another case! Actually there can be z-fighting where two surfaces are aligned in the same positions and hence even without any glass they alternate and produce some flickershit. I will look at your files.