Forums » CentiLeo for Cinema 4D
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IPR renders fine but Render to Picture Viewer generates black images?
 
ds
User  Posts: 18
Dec 1, 2021 22:55
I have been using CentiLeo happily for a while. I am fairly familiar with it's usage. I have run into a new problem tonight when trying to render a rather large scene (336mb scene file + 250mb of alembic animations).

It had been rendering fine all day, but I believe after adding the alembic files, I am unable to render in the general CentiLeo renderer, but IPR still renders fine. I just get a black frame.

When I "add to render queue" and start the job, it immediately fails and says "out of memory". I'm a little stuck as to how to reduce the memory usage or if it's complaining about GPU memory or system memory or what? I'd love to find a solution so I can render my scene because it's pretty cool :-p
 
Can you screenshot your scene and upload? Maybe one of your object sidebar/menu as well?
you have the proper lighting I assume?
AE any objects cloned or instances?
 
ds
User  Posts: 18
Dec 1, 2021 23:26
I took some screenshots.

Imgur link

Also I notice that it does this with physical and standard renderer, so I guess it's more a C4D issue than a CentiLeo issue. Would suck to have to start this scene from scratch and rebuild it piece by piece but I guess that's what I'm looking at to troubleshoot. Pretty sure everything went wrong when I added the alembic files but that's when I started adding animations and so is pretty much the whole scene. Bummer.
 
Did you look at your task manager and see how much memory is actually being used?

Also, when you post here there is am option to upload files directly ("Upload files" link button). So you can put them right here in this thread.
 
Administrator  Posts: 936
Dec 1, 2021 23:43
Hi ds, and welcome here! It looks strange. Out-of-memory is likely to be not CentiLeo error, but the one of C4D! :) Also the general PV render doesn't work when IPR is already running. Close IPR and then launch PV! If that doesn't help please can you send a scene with alembic inclusion to info@centileo.com for my investigations on the problem?
CentiLeo Chat: https://t.me/centileochat
 
ds
User  Posts: 18
Dec 1, 2021 23:50
Looking at the density here, I think I may have exported from zbrush with too many polys... Maybe I can re-export, re-rig, and get the animations still to work. Will try this tomorrow and if this doesn't work will send project file. Many thanks.
 
Administrator  Posts: 936
Dec 1, 2021 23:54
Too many polygons is not a problem for CentiLeo :)) It can eat any counts. You may see an example of our out-of-core technology https://centileo.com/news/147/centileo-out-of-core/
Btw what's you system CPU RAM size?
CentiLeo Chat: https://t.me/centileochat
 
ds
User  Posts: 18
Dec 2, 2021 07:37
> Btw what's you system CPU RAM size?

32 GB. Currently going through the process of retopologizing and re-rigging. As you said, might be more of a cinema issue than a centileo issue, in the editor I assume there is one level of memory requirements but when you press render and C4D "assembles the scene for render" (not sure what this is called in practice) I could see where exploding memory could be an issue. I do machine learning stuff too and exploding memory can be an issue there where you change a couple of parameters and the whole thing comes down, with the solution being "lower the resolution/model size" etc.

Thanks for CentiLeo, really nice project.
 
Administrator  Posts: 936
Dec 2, 2021 09:07
Thank you! :)
Are you doing machine learning experiments in a separate application to C4D? Or in C4D itself?
I am quite interested in finding a fix to your reported issue.
Btw, in one of your past topics you talked about supporting matrix color attributes https://centileo.com/forum/messages/forum19/message1207/220-if-i-have-a-spherical-field-with-color-r...
This is supported since some time ago: https://centileo.com/news/145/centileo-for-cinema4d-0610/
CentiLeo Chat: https://t.me/centileochat
 
ds
User  Posts: 18
Dec 7, 2021 07:45
This issue was fixed by lowering the poly count on the models I imported from zbrush. As you say, probably more a C4D issue than Centileo. Everything is working fine now.

I am doing machine learning in a separate application, I use python with GPU integration. I prepare and train models on a freelance basis for companies. I would like to use it for EG mesh generation, texture generation, or motion capture from 2d video, but there's not enough time in the day. Soon enough you will be able to point at a 2d picture or drawing of something and say "now generate a mesh for this". Or take a clip of someone dancing in a video and say "generate animation" and it will add that animation to a rig that can then be attached to other models. Although if I was going to make a plugin to do this, I would probably target blender at this point.

I did see you added matrix color attributes in the update, thank you sir! :-)

I am working on a spaceman shootout sequence that is coming along nicely.
 
Administrator  Posts: 936
Dec 7, 2021 12:03
It looks like you are doing a very good AI progress! Actually I can't believe such cools things are coming to life! Hope to test them at some point.
Blender is a good path, but I would also recommend not to forget Cinema 4D, first of all because it's also very cool and progresses nicelly, and also because CentiLeo is there :)
Quote
ds wrote:
This issue was fixed by lowering the poly count on the models I imported from zbrush.
How many polygons in total? Maybe your loader adds polygons each frame without releasing memory for ther previous frame? If that's some kind of Alembic it looks strange. What is your RAM size and what's the memory consumption in the Windows task manager during the PV render?

Looking forward to see you animations! :)
CentiLeo Chat: https://t.me/centileochat
 
ds
User  Posts: 18
Dec 8, 2021 06:17
This isn't my work but saw this today and thought to post it in case you are wondering about some specific example of machine learning for mesh generation -- it is rapidly progressing, so I expect to be able to use this in "plugin form" at some point in the future: https://twitter.com/jasonyzhang2/status/1467949093829988355.

> How many polygons in total? Maybe your loader adds polygons each frame without releasing memory for ther previous frame? If that's some kind of Alembic it looks strange. What is your RAM size and what's the memory consumption in the Windows task manager during the PV render?

170k per model with alembics for the animations. I reduced model polys to ~17k and applied the same animations and it worked. Ram usage not that bad, when I was rendering before it would immediately crash with the memory error, but now it's fine.
Edited: ds - Dec 8, 2021 06:23
 
Administrator  Posts: 936
Dec 8, 2021 08:33
Quote
ds wrote:
Ram usage not that bad, when I was rendering before it would immediately crash with the memory error, but now it's fine.
Have you seen these crashes in Cinema+CentiLeo? 17k or 170k polygons is really nothing, so there can be some bug or anything else, maybe a lot of polygons. I would like to investigate there if you can send me your scene that crashes.
CentiLeo Chat: https://t.me/centileochat
 
ds
User  Posts: 18
Dec 9, 2021 05:31
Here is the animation I was working on.

https://youtu.be/1Ij70rKdhAE

Still needs a couple scenes at the end and one at the beginning and to add audio, but you get the idea. This was all rendered with CentiLeo. One question, in the hall scenes, there is a lot of flickering on the lighting and reflections from frame to frame. Any idea what might be causing this? Should I increase the generated samples rate? I currently have it set to 1 sample per frame (compared to ~3 which I used to use, but of course this takes 3x as long). Been going hard on this for a couple of weeks.
Edited: ds - Dec 9, 2021 05:32
 
Administrator  Posts: 936
Dec 9, 2021 06:40
It looks like you use denoiser and low sample (iterations) count. That's why it flickers. CentiLeo doesn't use biased techniques inside.
CentiLeo Chat: https://t.me/centileochat
 
ds
User  Posts: 18
Dec 9, 2021 07:09
Ahhh, the denoiser, that makes sense. Will try increasing sample rate and turning off denoiser and rerendering.
 
Administrator  Posts: 936
Dec 9, 2021 07:58
You may test what settings really work for example by testing the animation in lowres just to get quick renders, then apply denoiser. Denoisers behave this way on extreme low sample counts.
CentiLeo Chat: https://t.me/centileochat
 
ds
User  Posts: 18
Dec 9, 2021 12:43
Trying with 4 samples and no de-noising and I notice there's a lot of variation in the lighting where I wouldn't expect from frame to frame. I have importance sampling turned on on the emissive light material, could that be doing it? Starting to think it's something to do with my scene. I'm attaching some screenshots with examples. Maybe I can find a temporal de-noising method or something, not sure what the latest state of the art is on that.
 
Administrator  Posts: 936
Dec 9, 2021 13:18
Quote
ds wrote:
Trying with 4 samples and no de-noising and I notice there's a lot of variation in the lighting where I wouldn't expect from frame to frame. I have importance sampling turned on on the emissive light material, could that be doing it?
Not sure what's wrong there. Do you mean variation as "more noise" without denoiser? That would need more iterations to resolve. Improtance sample On/Off for emissive light has slight difference between them. To get less or no diffrerence between these two options the "light shift" parameter should be zero, it's placed under material "bump" section.
CentiLeo Chat: https://t.me/centileochat
 
ds
User  Posts: 18
Dec 9, 2021 13:54
Hmmm, I'll mess with it a bit. I'll send the video when it's done rendering, but there still is quite a bit of flicker where the "brightness"(?) of the light changes for no apparent reason from frame to frame, separate from the added general noise.
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