I’m working on it 
It just needs a bit more investigation and tests like these.
Gijs, what are your gamma settings in vray? - looks good.
In fact the only setting that is important is the input gamma setting. If your monitor is calibrated for a gamma of 2.2 and a texture looks good on it, this means the input gamma for this texture has to be set to 2.2. I’ve set it globally in the gamma settings of Max, but of course you can set it locally per texture as well.
Setting the display gamma correction also to 2.2 helps to get a better material preview.
Then I use the gamma curve in Vray VFB as proposed by Rob Nederhorst to preview what it looks like. If I load the ‘dark’ image into Photoshop and assign it a profile with linear gamma, it looks as if you applied gamma correction.
What I found most interesting is that even if you are using intensity exponential color mapping, the gamma correction ‘rule’ still applies. I don’t have experience with compositing programs, but I can image that those programs have their own tone mapping algorithms to display a larger dynamic range. But in my case (and probably for a lot of other people that render directly to output) combining gamma correction with exponential color mapping is a good option
do you set texture gamma in photoshop before going in max or in max right off?
If it is an existing texture, I think it is better to set it in max, otherwise you need to save another copy. If however you can obtain textures that are already in linear space, it is better to keep them linear. The problem is that when going from linear to gamma 2.2, the dark tones loose the most information, because the dark regions are streched the most. This is visible when working with 8 bit textures. If however you have 16 bit textures you can make a safer switch from linear to gamma corrected (in other words, less chance for visible artifacts)
(Additionaly to emphasize the importance of bitdepth:
If you render to floating point RGB then there is no risk to go from linear to gamma corrected. If you save the linear image as a 8bit image and do the gamma correct in post, you get banding for sure)
i see…what i ment was, where exectly do you adjust gamma in the texture in max? (since we got so many options)…all this time i was working with vray’s color mapping. Totally forgot about vfb gamma thing.
My max gamma settings are as following:
-enable gamma correction: ON
-display gamma : 2.2
-Bitmap files:
+ input gamma : 2.2
+ output gamma : 1.0
btw: all vray settings are default (no GI saturation or contrast adjustment or materials with increased GI multipliers or any other tricks)
im looking forward to the tut gijs!!
hmmm…when i did the settings as you suggested, my scene went even darker then what i had…
I hope I did not confuse you, but those are only the max gamma settings. If you render with Vray framebuffer, you need to apply gamma correction for viewing as well, because it doesn’t use the max gamma setting. If however you copy your ‘dark’ Vray framebuffer to a max frambuffer it will have the gamma correction applied.
yeah i did render it in max vfb :? :?:
What kind of settings did you have before then?
just standart gamma in max preferences:
unchecked gamma correction
gamma 1.8
input/output for bitmap 1/1
i was however using vray color mapping gamma with bright multiplier set to 0.45 but i have reverted back to 1.0 when i set your settings.
Morbid- turn the max gamma correction on
that would be where? lol
under the max preferences/gamma
yeah i did …enable gamma correction i did exectly what gijs told me…
O.K, that’s why you get darker images,
you shouldn’t have reverted back to 1.0.
Either use gamma correct colormapping with bright set to 1/gamma (like you had) or apply the curve as mentioned by Rob Nederhorst in the linear space thread.
I guess it is time for the tut to clear all confusion, like you I’ve wrestled with these settings too long.
ok its just that you said that you had the gamma correction unchecked
These were his settings he had before applying the settings I posted…