Gamma

[glorybound]

Hi-

I just downloaded a scene from a blog and when I opened the scene it gave me the gamma warning so I had MAX use the scenes gamma, which was 1. I also rendered out the scene with V-Ray's gamma at 1. I was surprised to see a nicely exposed image; I was expecting a dark image. The scene was all gray so I made one of the scene's objects pure red and another pure yellow and when I eye dropped the final render the colors were spot on. I write this becasue I have the hardest time with colors using the LWF method thinking, since I have an LCD, it is a must.

Is LWF a must when using an LCD? Has anything changed in V-Ray or MAX recently that makes a non-LWF a good workflow? It seems that raising the dark multiplier brightens those shadows up nicely too.

[tammo]

Yes thats right, color mapping is very useful in vray and you dont have to use LWF anymore.
I like the look of Rheinhard mapping with the burn value set to 0.3

The best part is that you can simply save an image out of the framebuffer and send it to the client without having to adjust it in post.

[Shimakaze]

In general if you get good results it doesn't matter what method you use. There are a lot of misunderstandings about what LWF actually IS though...
Color mapping in vray doesn't have anything to do with LWF in Max. It only matters if you want the linear workflow to transfer over into a post program as well. If not, then color mapping IS your post program.

[glorybound]

Gamma

I have been confused about input maps. Does setting the gamma on a texture map coming into MAX change the gamma? If the texture map is gamma 2 and you import it as 2, is that going to double the gamma? How do you know what gamma the incoming texture map is?

[Shimakaze]

Yes, setting the gamma in the file open window changes the gamma of that individual picture in Max. It's actually an inverse value, so if you have a picture with gamma 2.2 you should set the value to 2.2, in essence to tell Max that that's the gamma space the picture is in. Doing that makes the picture linear. Knowing what gamma space a picture/texture is depends on the source. Pictures made for the net (and most freely available textures online) uses sRGB (2.2) because that's the standard for web content. If you take pictures with a digital camera they will be in that gamma space as well. In general, if a picture looks good on a regular monitor it's probably sRGB (unless you've calibrated your monitor to linear color space) The only times you'll come across linear pictures/textures is if you buy a texture pack that's specifically made linear, or if you create them yourself to be linear.
However, special textures like bump/displace/normal maps are almost always linear and should be treated as such.

Damn this post got complicated again... I'm gonna have to get around to write that sticky FAQ one of these days...