Hi everyone, I had to retouch some old files (version 3.x kind of old), so I decided to stick with the Gamma workflow, since I don’t have a good understanding of ACES yet.
Loading the original scene in Vray 6.2 gave me renders that are identical to the old ones, so that was a good start. I moved the lights around, applied Filmic (Hable) and test-rendered. All I was after was the RGB, no additional layers, no compositing process.
The result looked considerably muted in After Effects. I saved the sequence as .exr and ticked the “save VFB color corrections to RGB channel” but it didn’t do the trick.
I’m not asking for a step-by-step guide, just want to know if I can save what I see in the frame buffer without investing time to learn ACES.
Hi Hermit, the color profile in AE is sRGB, as is the VFB display. I’m using the same colorspace in Photoshop, with the same exact results.
The first attachment is a screenshot of the VFB, the second one is how the saved .exr looks like in Photoshop and After Effects.
My first impression was that the .exr lacked VFB’s tone-mapping. I removed it and the image in the VFB looked more desaturated than attachment “b”, so that’s probably not the case.
I’m also attaching a screenshot of the VFB settings, which are practically the default ones, save for the tone-mapper.
There was an occasion where I test-rendered a 60-frame sequence and the result was 99% identical to what I was seeing in the VFB, but I haven’t managed to replicate that since.
Edit: Copying to clipboard has the same result as saving the render.
Took a while but I decided to figure it out. As it turns out, the issue was my monitor’s .icm profile.
For years, I thought VFB used the same color profile as Windows, but it seems Max uses its own, internal color profile?
Anyway, I fished the monitor’s one from System32, renamed the .icm extension to .icc, and threw it into VFB’s Display Correction. Using that insted of srgb, I’m seeing exactly what I’m getting once I save the render. Therefore, it’s not that Tonemapping wasn’t being saved, it’s that I was viewing the image in one color profile, but saving it in a different one (if I understand the process correctly).
The question is, what’s the next step? VFB’s colors are much more vibrant than the ones in my saved renders, and I’d love to spend less time in post, bringing them back to what they should be.
Should I get equipped with screen calibration gear and hope the outcome is close to Max’s color profile? Should I look for a certain kind of screen?
It uses the OCIO default one set in the Color Management (Rendering > Color Management > Color Management Mode).
OCIO’s Display Device option should indicate the profile your monitor is set to. The default config has only a few choices, so a custom Display Device profile would require a custom OCIO config.
What you can do is add an ICC profile layer (not Display Correction)in the VFB stack and load the profile in it. For multi-channeled images, make sure it gets saved in the image via the “save VFB color corrections to RGB channel”.
