Category: Nerd stuff

Just some days ago I found a question in the facebook Logik group about how to apply a preview look LUT in flame when working in ACES. I had to do this already sometimes, so I could help out amongst others, but for sure I will forget about it in the next weeks and won’t be able to find it when I need it again. So I put together the working steps that are needed to do the same in Nuke and pointed out some obvious limitations with 3D-LUTs in ACES.

Another article for in the menu Learning ACES:
“2.6.1. Apply 3D-LUTs in flame and nuke“

with some help from Nuke.

A look at Resolve and what the basic controls do to your image: without color management, when using a 3D-LUT and what changes when Resolve is switched to ACES.

2.5.3. Understanding Resolve Color Management with Nuke

Taking a texture from the “screen” and bringing it inside the “scene”.

In this article I focus on the sRGB-Texture IDT and the right usage in Nuke or 3D packages.

Please find the article in the menu Understanding ACES:

“2.7. The sRGB-Texture IDT“

Converting a simple scene with some textures and a HDRI

Here comes another project that I wanted to check out and test. Can I take a very simple scene that I created in Blender out of the box and convert it to render it in ACES? For me it worked out smoothly in this case.

I learned a lot on the way and I am happy to share the results. It can be also found in the menu Learning ACES:
“1.9. FILMIC to ACES“

This a another new entry in the menu Learning ACES:
“1.8. Moving into a bigger gamut“

with Affinity Photo, Nuke and Blender.

A look at what happens when you linearize a texture, render it in a scene and use a different view transform than the initial image/texture had.

This a a new entry in the menu Learning ACES:
“1.7. From images to textures“

and what it means to work under or on top of them.

In the process of writing a new article for the website about textures I digged up some older notes and finally added them here.

Find it in the menu Learning ACES or here:
“1.6. Adding “colors” before/after a view transform“

Limitations with version 2.83 and up to 2.90.3 alpha

Today (12th of May 2020) I filed a bug or limitation when working with 8-Bit textures in Blender that need a colorspace transform. So I added some notes of other limitations I ran into in the last weeks and months while exploring Blender & ACES:

• All color images should be EXR files in the colorspace ACEScg – in this way they don’t need any colorspace transform inside Blender.
• Colorspace transforms in Textures (Input – Generic – sRGB Texture) will result in imprecise or sometimes wrong results when the image texture is a 8-Bit file! (the transforms should happen in floating point precision)
• Non-Color image texture files e.g. bump or normal maps need to have the color space set to “raw” (no gamut or gamma mapping) – then there is not problem when using JPG/PNG files
• Blender misses an option to select the OCIO file in the preferences – at the moment you must set the OCIO environment variable before starting Blender.
• The list of colorspaces are not sorted in categories like it is in Nuke for example. The list is so large and long you need a giant screen to see them all and be able to select one with is at the end of the list – as a workaround you can temporally scale down the Resolution Scale smaller than 1.0 in the Interface/Display Preferences.
• Be aware that you are working in a far bigger gamut of ACEScg – I wrote an article called Understanding Gamut with ACES and Blender about this topic.
• The Blackbody shader which doesn’t really works in ACEScg.

Go to the page for some more detailed information.

TAG ONLY – AUTO CONVERT – VIEW TRANSFORM

It’s time to note down some flame related ACES stuff. Here is the first article.

How to work with ACES material and do some basic online work before exporting a ProRes Master for a client.

Click here to read it or find it in the menu “Panicpost – Understanding ACES”.