Silverwing Quick-Ish Tip: AgX Tonemapping
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- Опубликовано: 1 авг 2024
- Made Using C4D 2023.2.1
Octane 2022.1.1 R5
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Riley Brown - Unlock Better Color in Blender
• Video
Troy Sobotka´s AgX on Github:
github.com/sobotka/AgX
Genco Üneys AgX on Github:
github.com/Joegenco/PixelManager
Shout out to Prof. Michael Klein aka El Professor for initially bringing AgX to my attention.
Another longer Tip this week:
This time something I wanted to do for a long time. The mysterious AgX color workflow. I guess it´s most well known with Blender users. But did not find wide adoption outside of it. I hope you find this tut interesting!
And thank you very much for watching.
P.s. leave a comment if you have any good Idea for a future quick tip / tut.
00:00 Intro
01:40 3D Diamond: Scene what is AgX
02:27 3D Diamond: Showing ACES Tonemapping
03:21 3D Diamond: Showing AgX Tonemapping
04:12 3D Diamond: Setting up AgX
06:35 3D Cornell: Looking at the scene
07:41 3D Cornell: Showing ACES Tonemapping
08:11 3D 3D Cornell: Showing AgX Tonemapping
09:10 3D 3D Cornell: Differences ACES / AgX
09:54 3D Diamond: Output Methods for AgX
13:19 Comp: Setting up the Viewing LUT
15:28 Comp: Some Color Correction
16:09 Chart Time: Recap OCIO Workflows
18:29 Comp: Setting up the Output
20:40 Outro
Damn you're like the Tom Scott of Octane. You do your research thoroughly and present it in such a great way. Clear as always!
Its too bad that we have these amazing tools and colorspaces which should be standard but are still so unknown and unclear throughout the 3d industry.
Thank you very much for your nice comment and the compliments.
I am doing my best to spread awareness 🙌
You are my HERO on OCTANE RENDER!!!
Super nice to hear that. Much appreciated 😊
Thank you again sir, always learning something new with your tutorials 👍
Thank you very much. Great to hear that 🙏🙌
I never heard about Agx, thanks for the video.
So did I. It´s always fascinating to learn something new!
Amazing. Thanks you!
Thank you very much Shawn 🙌
good information thank you always
Thank you. Much appreciated 🙏
Chris Brejon has a wonderful topic about this.
very great❤.hope there will be an article on metal editing in the near future.
Thank you very much.
About a possible metal material tutorial. What information would you hope to find in such a tut?
I am asking to better understand what people might have difficulties with.
Thank you Raphael for covering the topic! Btw I used to desaturate some vivid colors in chromatic aberration areas inside glass, when I worked in ACES. Just simple saturation filter, but it does quite a nice job in blue and purple
Ah nice. Thank you for your insight. Its always good to know multiple solutions 🙌
Aces gamut compression 1.3 also helps with the glaring issues of Blue/magenta in ACES. But other distortions are still inherently there.
@@SilverwingVFX not a viably proper “solution”. Only dodgy workarounds.
Thank you so much Raphael, can you please also do a small quick tip for the same with after effects. Again great job brother!!!
Thank you Prajwal for your comment.
For AE you can follow this tutorial. But instead of ACES you can load the PixelManager-master ocio.config
ruclips.net/video/ZIXceP3CKWI/видео.html
If you are working in ACEScg then:
Input: Utilitis Linear ACES - AP1
Output: Display AgX Base
If you are working with Linear sRGB then:
Input: Utilitis Linear Rec.709/sRGB
Output: Display AgX Base
In order to make tonemapping work correctly you have to have a linear workflow with floating-point files (files that support brighter then white values)
Otherwise you will get artifacts (funny looking highlights)
There is also a way to make it work with the new AE internal OCIO system. But its more complicated to explain here in text form.
Hope this helps 🙂
Thank you for making in depth this comporation between this 2 looks. Btw, I guess that tcam v2 almost no one uses.
I am!)
I don’t think it is legally usable outside Filmlight software. I believe it is specified somewhere.
Another great video. I'm just about to figure our which one works better for my images, but it looks like AgX might come out as the winner. I like how the details in the highlights are preserved a little better. The looks I can always tweak in post.
Thank you very much Andreas.
Thank you for sharing your insights. That´s interesting to hear.
I think AgX makes it easier to become "friends" with then ACES.
Since I worked with ACES for so long. I will keep my workflow, and then switch if I feel ACES has problems with saturation levels.
The great thing is that it does not require a re-render if you already have rendered in ACES.
@@SilverwingVFX We will see. As I said, I'm just beginning to gather experience with those two. If I go for ACES I will stick to Rec.709 as it keeps the shadows a bit lighter. But I will know more for sure once I rendered a bunch of images and see how they work in post-processing.
@@andreas_resch Hey hey, nice seeing your reply. Yes when working with ACES I also tend to use the Rec.709 tonemapper.
Happy rendering and all the best in figuring out your best workflow.
@@andreas_resch ACES ODTs are technical elements of the whole color encoding system, not creative. LMTs or in-post tweaks are the way to adjust the rather excessively contrasted “ACES look”. As you said in the original comment, AgX and subjective tweaking is covering nearly all individuals cases of CG images. ACES is utterly futile and dispensable.
I think I watch almost all your videos. The knowledge you bestow is so intricate and detailed. Rarely ever touched or talked about through others. You have taught me so much about Octane and Cinema. Thanks!
Quick question about aces tonemapping. I have heard others say you don't want this turned on for greater control of your image. What would be the use cause scenario to turn it on/off in the camera imager? And can you use the aces tone mapping on any profile? I am just not sure when to use it. Thanks!
Wow thank you very much for your support and your nice words! Glad you like my content!
About your question:
I am not exacly sure, but I think you are talking about tonemapped output vs ACEScg / ACES 2065-1 output.
If you save the exact version that you see when looking at "ACES sRGB" version and try to do comp on it, it does not work correctly because the once linear values, that you need for mathematically putting together e.g. lights, are now scewed a way that looks good to our eyes.
If you do not intend to do further comp to your image, you can save out the ACES sRGB tone mapped version.
If you want to do comp, it´s best to save the full ACES space and do the ACES sRGB conversion in comp later on.
If working with ACES, or any other color space then what your Display handles, you always have to look at it through a color transform that transforms it to the display color space. Otherwise you see wrong colors and can´t really judge what you are doing.
Sorry, this is such a vast topic and maybe I did not answer your question at all. Or confused you even more.
I have the feeling I only half understood what you were asking.
Maybe you can clear this up by elaborating on your question a bit.
Thanks and a great start into the weekend to you!
Hey, great as always. Quick-ish suggestion: Can you make a video about BRDF modes an when to use which? I know it has something to do with specularity and metalness but I feel quite lost there.
Hey and thank you very much for your suggestion. BSDFs are on my list.
Though I mostly use GGX or GGX energy preserving. That cancels out a lot of options already.
If course its always better to know the why. Hopefully I get around to that tut soon!
I started using Octane with Modo recently and this is one thing I miss with Modo's renderer, that you could apply additional Reinhard RGB tonemapping before the ACES LUT was applied.
Ah yes, I remember Reinhard from the Vray Days.
To be honest I don´t think ACES (or AgX) and Reinhard would go together well.
Reinhard, if my memory serves me right, tonemapps everything down to a 0 to 1 range. Aces and AGX however are made especially to deal with harsh highlights in the above 1 range.
So at least in theory it seems like a one or the other, but not both situation.
@@SilverwingVFX Well I certainly found it damn handy for similar reasons you've pointed out in the video. I can still apply a tone mapper on top of ACES (or before ACES) in Fusion if I want to, but it was handy to have that control in the render view.
That’s an unseemly destructive approach subject to avoidance. ACES comes with its own natively, built into the ODTs (the RRT). There are other ways to “have aesthetic subjective control” in post based on a given color encoding system, including the available tools in compositing software.
@@elijahsakiya There are other ways, but this is a pretty damn quick one that got me where I needed to get to before even going into comp if I wanted to. Not that destructive, it didn't (doesn't) clamp to 0-1 either as long as I don't set it to maximum. The ACES LUTs are pretty good, but I still needed a bit more and it's a quick way of doing it "in render".
@@mattperson7293 I presume you were referring to the superannuated “Reinhard luminance version” While it may give some basic controls, it doesn’t control nor substitute for the “hardcoded” RRT of the ODT that does remain as it is in the image formation chain. An ACES pipeline would also involve LMTs.
More generally, not because something, more often than not anachronistic, does provide fallaciously satisfactory results, means it’s the right path.
The initial point remains relevant as those inadvertently called “tonemappers” are a redundantly counter-productive operations inducing the duplication of inevitable core issues, present in all of them*, unequivocally obsolete for today’s standards and by nature, leading to a flawed imagery rendition. *Typically the ones found on old-enough renderers.
Octane’s native Camera Imager options are no exception, hence the upmost importance and necessity of OCIO. That said, devs are continuously exploring the viability for a new native solution.
Last but not least, ACES is not a LUT. People tend to push topics they don’t fully understand and rapidly fall into the Dunning-Kruger Effect, as seen in other comments or videos.
Is this ACES 1.something? There was a known issue with those out of range blue tones of doom. ACES 2.0 now has proper settings to address this issue.
Yes, this is ACES 1.2 This is the state where we are at in terms of built in capabilities of Octane.
Looking forward when those gamut compensation settings come to the 3D software.
What kind of exposure should i use with AgX? Thank you for the amazing tutorials and knowledge.
Hey there and thank you for your comment.
Other than ACES that benefits from a +0.5 to +1 exposure compared to your sRGB render. AgX does not need an exposure change. I myself do expose for ACES all the time usually as with 32bit float / 16bit float its easily correctable in comp.
Any. Whatever suits the scene. Particularly with EXR, It doesn’t matter, if the worries come from the notorious misconception of “burning the highlights”. In fact, many renders are fallaciously rendered with “weak light emission”.
“Scene light energy” should never be limited to a faulty and inappropriate digital image formation (typical with the linear-sRGB to sRGB EOTF default transform).
Update: After i made some tests to compare between using the All in one OCIO and doing it manually
1- i inserted the EXR16bit Aces Cg and applied a viewing OCIO of the source "Linear Aces AP-1" and Output "Agx Base" and made it as buffer A
2- I made a branch of the same exr and instead made the process manually in which i inserted an OCIO changing from Aces CG to Lin_srgb then from Linear BT.709 to Agx Base
Results were the difference were quiet drastically showing in the highlights. The highlights appeared to be bleeding towards the borders and felt like some information were lost. although they both follow the same process but in conclusion doing it manually is better.
i hope you test it and tell me if you notice it too
Thank you for being curious and testing!
I just did a test with my old Cornell Box render:
ACEScg EXR 16bit float --> OCIO AgX PixelManager (ACES AP1 to AgX Base)
ACEScg EXR 16bit float --> OCIO ACES 1.2 (ACEScg to Linear sRGB) --> OCIO AgX (ACES Linear Rec.709 / sRGB to AgX Base)
They both look 1:1 identical. No difference.
Not sure what I did different from you. I get the expected result here 😅
@@SilverwingVFX the difference is i used Aces Cg --> linear srg then Linear bt.709 to Agx Base (instead of Aces Linear.rec 709)
Great video as always. At 15:16, I believe you can choose Agx Punchy look in the Look menu right below Output Space. Also, I can't make Genco's OCIO work in Octane, it gives error about no OCIO Intermediate Color Space while I definitely set both ACES 2065-1.
EDIT: Genco's OCIO works if I leave intermediate color space to Automatic.
EDIT2: AgX Punchy is not in the Look menu in Fusion.
Report these!! This is why I didn't release it yet there few annoying inconsistencies that I couldn't spot in all software.
Fixing this soon.
@@GencoUney It's a brilliant work otherwise! It's so funny that I was playing with Unreal Engine 5 while hearing Silverwing says there is no punchy look, I wondered why wouldn't there be and looked into the ocio file, then I coincidentally found your hidden sRGB_Looks lines. UE5 is just one of the softwares that doesn't have a look option in its OCIO settings. So far your ACES - AgX sRGB Punchy workflow looks good in UE5, I'll report if there's anything.
@@DomZeal Cheers!
Do you get the "error about no OCIO Intermediate Color Space" when you set it to "Automatic"?
This might be due to Octane expecting to find ACES-2065-1 in the config and not finding the colorspace. This is defined in the aliases of Linear ACES AP-0 but it seems Octane cannot read aliases.
I don't have means to test Octane atm. Would you be able to swap the name and alias for "Linear ACES - AP0" in your config and tell me if that works?
Basically
name: ACES2065-1
aliases: [Linear ACES - AP0]
@@GencoUney Oh, the man himself! A welcome surprise. Thanks so much for taking the time to answer questions! Highly appreciated 🙌
@@DomZeal Thank you very much for your nice comment and great suggestions!
About Genco's OCIO in Octane. I have set the automatic checkmark and it seems to work fine for me in Octane. I just did not choose it because the list of options fills my whole screen. So I opted for the Original slimmer package 😇
In the "OCIO Look" in Octane I see the Punchy look with Gencos files. On Fusion the menu named "Look" that you hinted at somehow does not work yet 😞
have you tried the new ACES? don't remember which version exactly but the latest seems to work better and doesn't have the issues of previous version.
Thank you for your comment!
I have not. No doubt there are going to be improvements to the ACES tonemapper. I am looking forward trying it.
Still does.
@@elijahsakiya still does what?
@@elconquistador3340 …have flaws and produce undesirable results.
I'm noob in this color management/colorspace term. which one is better for compositing? AgX or ACES?
Hi and thank you for your comment.
The workflow I show is:
Rendering → Linear Float (sRGB or ACEScg)→ Compositing → Tonemapping (In this last step you apply ACES to sRGB or AGX.
So everything that comes before is linear and handles more or less the same in comp.
The answer depends on the way your workflow is structured and what you normally do in the comp stage.
If you are comping Linear Float, then there is no difference.
If you bake the look into the images in 3D and go with e.g. 16bit formats, then I ACES sRGB Is good if you do not want to do too much in comp (Alredy looks punchy)
and AgX might be better if you want to still fine tune your contrast (as its rather flat looking)
@@SilverwingVFX Thanks a lot. ❤️
@@SilverwingVFX the “flat looking” from AgX base? It’s a closed domain output, analogously to an sRGB EOTF. AgX-log is for integer post workflow.
7:40 - Very interesting topic. Were you using gausian spectrum for the light color?
Thank you very much for your comment!
Yeah. Gaussian would have improved the situation even with sRGB. But I wanted to create the worst situation the renderer could run into.
@@SilverwingVFX Yes. I think it would. Beside the "Saturate to white" on camera - But tha's cheating... 😅
@@fernandolardizabal458 Ha ha indeed. Well use what works best for you.
With OCIO Saturate to white and highlight compression does not work to my knowledge. So it´s ither the one or the other 😅
Hi Raphael, i'm using BT1886 Appearance Punchy and looks great on Octane live viewer but when i render the final looks a bit different, a little desaturated, is it normal? I render on the Render AOV Group - PNG 16 Bit with settings Buffer Type: HDR Floar 32BIT and Color Space sRGB. Thank you again
Hey there Nia,
unfortunately baking OCIO in 8 or 16bit images in Octane is kind of hard (if it is not the one click ACES Tonemapping)
If you render with your settings, especially Color Space sRGB, then to my knowledge you get unaltered sRGB no OCIO AgX.
You can get AgX of course through 32bit workflows I describe in my video. But if you want to bake it down you can (to my knowledge) only do that by setting the Type to SDR 8Bit and color Space to OCIO and there select AGX BT1886 Type Punchy.
Then last but not least go through the C4D save output e.g. "PNG 8bit" not the Octane (Render AOV Group) one.
I just tried it and it works. But you only get an 8 bit image. There might be another way that I am not aware of right now. I hope there is as this is rather limited.
If I have the time. I will do some tests tomorrow.
Cheers and in the meantime a great time to you✨
@@SilverwingVFX Wow thank you so much for taking the time for this. I appreciate it very much. I'll go with the 32bit workflow instead. Will give those a try asap 🙏💫
Should we color correct before or after making the scene linear, isnt the point of linearizing it to make it flat so you adjust colors properly?
ACEScg is a linear space. Its a different color space (gamut) then sRGB.
The EXR is saved in linear ACEScg color space. So every correction you would do between the input and the OCIO node, as the Color Correction shown, will be done in linear color space!
The last OCIO ACEScg to AgX Base is not linearizing it but giving it an sRGB curve so we can watch it on our sRGB screens properly.
@@SilverwingVFX wow i didnt expect you to reply i appreciate that you care about your fans and taking time to clarify, thank you king
@@3omar. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the positive response.
As long as I can manage to overview and reply to all comments. I will keep it ✨
Greetings. Thank you for the lesson.
Unfortunately, there are still many questions about the pipeline with AgX.
I still don't understand why you are translating the image into ACES Cg.
Why not in ACES 2065? Why is this conversion necessary?
Further, why and for what do you save in 16 bit format? Why not at 32?
Why the standard export of Linear sRGB does not suit you.
I would be very grateful if you tell me. Thank you!
Hey there and thank you very much for your questions!
ACEScg vs ACES 2065-1:
The convention is that CGI is delivered in ACEScg. As far as I know Octane saves the full color range it produces also in ACEScg (represented in negative values) so the data should be there when needed. If ACES 2065-1 is more fitting for your workflow. That should work too.
Why I used 16bit Float EXRs
16 bit is also called Half Float. And has the simple benefit that it has most of the advantages for 32bit but only uses half of the space on disc.
Octane is very smart about it. So if you are using channels that require full precission, as World Position, or Cryptomatte it will be saved in 32bit.
Why I am not fond of Linear sRGB:
Future proving. sRGB is a really small color space. Basically the smallest dinominator of color spaces. If I ever need that render in another color space that is bigger then sRGB, I would have to re-render the sequence. ACEScg has big color space so you can cover all used color spaces as DCI-P3 for Cinema, Rec.2020 for HDR (Streaming or 4K Bluray)
Hope that helps you understand some of my decissions!
Cheers and a great rest of the weekend and start into next week!
@@SilverwingVFX thank you so much for your help and what you do!
Hello again.
I've watched this tutorial quite a few times and I still can't figure out the following.
The scene with the crystal that you demonstrate is not complicated in my opinion.
There are no very large differences in brightness, and the difference visually varies by several photographic stops.
Sorry, but this is a purely visual comparison. What are the advantages of ACES Cg with Linear Rec 709?
What might this affect? Unlike ACES, if I understand correctly, it is not a color space but acts as a tonemapper.
Thank you!
Thank you for your comment and your questions Dmitry,
I would like to answer you but unfortunately I don't understand what you are asking 😇
Might you please rephrase your question for me to understand it better and therefore be able to properly respond 🙏
@@SilverwingVFX I just can’t understand why, when working with AgX, you save the image in ACES Cg, for what? Why not Linear rec 709?
@@SilverwingVFX I'll try this, what's the difference between ACES Cg and Linear rec 709?
Ah, now I understand, thank you for making this clearer.
There are several reasons why saving in ACEScg are beneficial.
Mostly it's about the workflow. There the usual ethic is to work with the most accurate most detailed dataset available.
If you feed data into a tonemapper you want to make sure there is all the data, the tonemapper needs.
And it should be rather to much data then too little.
What I am saying here is that the tone mapper will discard data that is to much but can't invent or create data that was not there.
So it´s a good practice to go with the biggest container.
Another positive here is data archival. If you have to re-interpret your render for another colorspace or you have to conform it for a certain screen, it´s great if you have the data stored in your files. Otherwise you would have to render again.
If you render to linear sRGB / Rec.709 (which is the same) you are rendering to a smaller color space and hence throw away some color data (that has already been computed) So it´s apropriate to save it no matter if you can use it or not at the moment. Especially since it comes with no additional cost (storage space)
The only cost I can think of is the a bit more complicated workflow and the knowledge you have to bring to the table to deal with ACEScg renders.
Hope that clears up things a bit 🙌
@@SilverwingVFX Thank you very much for your answer. I left to think about the above.
When do you find time to earn a living? 😊
Right now I don´t 😅 But the market is slow anyway and I don´t get a lot of requests anyway... 😬
@@SilverwingVFXdamn! Hard to grasp a man with your skills is in that situation.