Use absolute rgb values in material editor with LWF

[tekuchi]

Quite often we have to match a swatch or RAL value which a client gives us. This means we have a nice library of materials in old jobs that using Linear Workflow now have to be changed, not to mention all of the old jobs that people ask for a new render of.
With the rgb values being much lighter using LWF it would be most useful to have a little checkbox in the colour mapping dialogue that forces the rgb values to behave as though they were without gamma correction.

[Neilg]

This is called the colour correct plugin, do a search for it. Doesnt work with 64bit max 9 though.

[tekuchi]

The trouble is that means lots of work going through and adding colour correction maps to all your existing materials. No problem if you are creating your materials from scratch, but what if you have loads of materials already in a number of large jobs?

Would it not be more simple to do this from within the render dialogue - or the vray material options instead of using a colour corrector map?

just a thought

[joconnell]

I've got a script that does that - http://www.joconnell.com/view.php?category=3d&view=19

[panthon]

Would it not be more simple to do this from within the render dialogue - or the vray material options instead of using a colour corrector map?

just a thought

I agree. A vray CC bitmap loader has been proven to be a must lately.
No offence, I like CC from Cuneyt Ozdas, but being forced to rely on a free plugin without being certain if it´s going to be updated in the future is not good news.

[tekuchi]

That's another good point. Relying on free plugs is not great.

I am trying to switch over to LWF at the moment and the problem that I have is that it is that it is not a truly linear workflow.
If you choose a swatch colour from your (fully calibrated) photoshop environment and then enter the figures into the diffuse swatch in the max material editor then you will get a different (lighter) colour when you render.

If you use the colour correct map then you will see a darker swatch colour in the material editor than that of photoshop. it's confusing!

This issue affects not only diffuse colours, but all refract colours, fog, relfection values etc since you will have to compensate for gamma in all cases. It seems to me that we are having to compensate for something that the renderer/max should deal with automatically.

Of course bitmaps are not affected since you can set the input value to 2.2

(can't get the script to work mentioned above - any tips?!)

[MegaPixel]

Have you considered making small bitmaps of your raw diffuse colors so that the material corrections within MAX will apply to it also? Lately, I've been making small 10pixel square images of the raw diffuse colors I want to use. May be one extra step, but I usually don't have too many surfaces that need to be a specific color.

On that note, perhaps a built in diffuse color correcter for fututre version of Vray would be um... nice

[jujubee]

@joconnell - did you fix the submaterials error on the removal convertor for CC?

[tekuchi]

The colour swatch is a good idea megapixel,

The only trouble I forsee with that is if you wanted to lightly blend a texture over the colour -

I think I'll use this approach instead of the colour corrector.

The other way I found is to apply a gamma correction to the colour in photoshop using exposure, then sample and copy the colour over.

Still not perfect, but it is a solution for the meantime until this issue is resolved.