Hi Vlado,
Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply to all of my questions.
The main concern I have is about the color picker. As you say you would gamma correct a RGB value only when the color comes from an 8 bit texture.
After years of trial and errors I come to the conclusion that I always want to color correct the rgb value, also if it doesn't come from an 8 bit texture because, as it is now, it's very very hard to control.
I understand what you say: In both the cases I am always picking up a color between black and white so ,potentially, I can achieve the same result.
But believe me, when you plug it with .4545 node, what you see and render makes much more sense.
If you don't, all the shader is forced towards the bright areas and you end up with values like this:
0 if you want pure black (and you probably never want pure black)
1-5 darks
5-50 midtones
50-100 brights
100-255 highlights
meanwhile in the .4545 scenario the values are more easily distributed:
0-50 blacks
50-100 darks
100-150 midtones
150-200 bright
200-255 highlights
This is a rough estimate but please give it a try.
Create a material in both the setups and you will find that the .4545 approach is much more easy to setup and control.
While, without it, you will see that when you create a reflective material assigning an RGB value of 50,50,50 gives you a surface already too much reflective.
A black plastic needs RGB values lower than 1,1,1 in reflection to look natural so you end up having to do tricks for those fractional values.
The same happens with the refraction.
The material become immediately way too refractive at 50,50,50 and I have the feeling that this happens with most of the things that you control with an RGB value in Vray.
This is the reason why I think the color picker should be color corrected automatically by default.
This happens in Mray through the gamma and lut panel in Max but doesn't happen with Vray, so, I was guessing that it was due to the fact that the Mray uses floating point value (0 to 1) meanwhile Vray RGB (0-255)
Kind Regards,
Giacomo.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply to all of my questions.
The main concern I have is about the color picker. As you say you would gamma correct a RGB value only when the color comes from an 8 bit texture.
After years of trial and errors I come to the conclusion that I always want to color correct the rgb value, also if it doesn't come from an 8 bit texture because, as it is now, it's very very hard to control.
I understand what you say: In both the cases I am always picking up a color between black and white so ,potentially, I can achieve the same result.
But believe me, when you plug it with .4545 node, what you see and render makes much more sense.
If you don't, all the shader is forced towards the bright areas and you end up with values like this:
0 if you want pure black (and you probably never want pure black)
1-5 darks
5-50 midtones
50-100 brights
100-255 highlights
meanwhile in the .4545 scenario the values are more easily distributed:
0-50 blacks
50-100 darks
100-150 midtones
150-200 bright
200-255 highlights
This is a rough estimate but please give it a try.
Create a material in both the setups and you will find that the .4545 approach is much more easy to setup and control.
While, without it, you will see that when you create a reflective material assigning an RGB value of 50,50,50 gives you a surface already too much reflective.
A black plastic needs RGB values lower than 1,1,1 in reflection to look natural so you end up having to do tricks for those fractional values.
The same happens with the refraction.
The material become immediately way too refractive at 50,50,50 and I have the feeling that this happens with most of the things that you control with an RGB value in Vray.
This is the reason why I think the color picker should be color corrected automatically by default.
This happens in Mray through the gamma and lut panel in Max but doesn't happen with Vray, so, I was guessing that it was due to the fact that the Mray uses floating point value (0 to 1) meanwhile Vray RGB (0-255)
Kind Regards,
Giacomo.
Comment