Film-look in Blender with AgX

today I'm covering an approach to image formation called agx a tool finally making it to blender 4.0 as a default option this video isn't me saying that everyone should immediately switch to agx you'll need to see if it works for your style and your personal pipeline we'll establish some important background information and look at comparisons of agx next to filmic Asus and even an Airy cinema camera now obviously these are all super different things to be comparing but I'll show you some color sweeps to try to simplify that comparison agx is a colloquial term for film material AG being silver and X being any number of compounds within blender filmix been the default color transform for years now but again agx is coming to the new version of blender 4.0 so understanding what it does is going to be pretty important we'll talk Theory science and we'll look at some practical examples of agx in action to set at the stage let's talk about something called relative perception when we look out into the world our eyes detect light and experience color to really understand what light and color are from a scientific perspective we'd have to take a deep dive into electromagnetic radiation photons wavelengths and more not that those things aren't important but for the sake of keeping this about the art let's think of color in terms of how we experience it as humans we process things in our own own individual ways some people actually believe color is strictly an internal experience meaning it's part of our human experience and might not even exist outside of perception as Galileo put it I think that tastes odors colors and so on reside in the Consciousness hence if the living creature were removed all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated this can open the door to get us thinking about color and light in relative terms meaning there not absolute we'll call this relative perception as we break down agx in color it might help to lose the notion that the word accurate holds weight or that it's somehow predictable and uniform if anything the human perception of light and color just isn't as uniform as sometimes we want to believe which brings us to a really good point and that's that cameras don't capture light and color in uniform ways either we've got an image here used with permission from Japanese psychologist akosi katala if I asked you what color is this train I'm sure you'd be suspicious of me but answer honestly based on what you see and you might say the train is red or maybe orange this is a perception our minds put together based on available context information this perception to you is accurate the train is red surprisingly if we isolate this portion of the train and remove it from the context of the image it's actually not red at all in other words we lose the color sensation of redness in the new context the color appears kind of gray maybe even a desaturated cyan so as you can see hopefully there's a difference between the radiation stimulus of red and the mind's color sensation of redness pretty wild the pixels or the stimulus in this case didn't change I promise yet when the context change likely so did your perception that's an example of relative perception so really when we talk about color consider two things there's stimulus and there's perception I hope you can see how these are totally different things to be talking about so when I say color is not absolute what I'm talking about is how the perception of color is not absolute as an artist my job isn't about asking what's accurate as much as it is to ask how will people perceive this now this goes much broader than just color for me it's all about sharing ing that perception our own messy limited unique human take because at the end of the day that's all we have experience to connect us and it's this brief but sometimes shared perception for me that brings the value to Art you can look at a Picasso for example some with accuracy on the brain might say hey that's that's not accurate that's total mess the reality of Relativity in perception though is that just because I see doesn't mean that you see like I see I think that's enough of an abstract but I hope you see what I'm trying to get at talking about color and absolutes does little for our understanding it might be better to think in terms of Relativity this is the frame we need going into understanding what agx can do for your image formation within CG image formation we're naturally working against some limitations let's look at an example scenario there are two people one stands before a medieval village the environment stretches out Beyond them and the sun illuminates the scene before them the second is standing indoors viewing a painting of the same Village you could say that both of these people to some degree experience the beauty of the environment obviously though the one viewing the painting is working with some natural limitations one they're staring at a 2d plane the painting doesn't extend infinitely into the distance and two the painting doesn't give off any light whereas the actual physical environment is illuminated by the bright rays of the Sun the artist within the medium of paint on canvas has to some degree overcome these obstacles first they've used perspective painting techniques to give the illusion that this canvas is almost a viewing portal into the artist's perception again literally it's just 2D canvas but the perception is where the value comes from giving the viewer a perceived sense of environment second although unable to paint with the Rays of the Sun the artist within the orchestrated context of the image has created again the perception or the sensation of light as the viewer studies the picture they don't just see it they read it and they share in the perception of it reading something that belongs to the collection of elements around it the painting offers contextual clues in reference to itself this concept of reading an image is important as we make decisions about the context we create in our digital paintings especially as we move forward into a time of virtual and mixed reality and the digital medium continues to expand in its ability to convey our perception just as ink on a page means very little without being able to read the words so too would pixels on a screen be meaningless without the viewer's visual literacy and the value in shared perception the ability to read the image everybody reads images at different levels of skill and comprehension again this is our relative perception a skilled author understands their readers and takes them them on a journey the Best Authors paint a picture in the reader's mind using various techniques and literary devices in our medium of CG art we too can paint images for viewers to read we can use certain techniques and visual literary devices to give our viewers more context or more information to Aid them in the task of reading or perceiving the image all of this serves to further the connection through shared perception just like our example of the skilled painter agx is just one more tool in an artist's hands to author further visual context okay going into part two we need an intermission I made you a present do with it what you want but the only way to see it is to click the link in the description it links you to a normal pricing page to subscribe and support what I do except this pricing page has been altered with that special little gift I always feel weird asking but supporting myself and other artists is very much not weird so at least consider subscribing to the lowest tier of course only if you're in a place where you can give a few dollars a month I get a text every time someone subscribes and I can't tell you how happy and secure it would make me feel if we could get to our huge goal of 100 subscribers I've already left my job building this and if you want to support my videos my own Productions this is your invitation that's all now for part two with context established we're ready to visualize agx imagine a graph vertically we have Hugh a shift in color or wavelength along the visual spectrum and horizontally we have light on the left almost no light and on the right so much light everything eventually becomes white let's pause for our friend Albert hmel without him we might not have this super useful artistic model for simplifying and formalizing color again keep in mind our relative perception but to visualize agx we'll use Mel's three elements to determine colors Hue value and chroma so back to the graph vertically we have Hue and horizontally we have value if I asked you to fill in the blanks here to progress what happens to color as it receives more value some may be tempted naturally to fill everything in constant like this this actually isn't the case due to something we call the abne effect discovered by British chemist and photographer Sir William Abney let's take a look at a visualization of the abne effect on a blue color as we add more pure white light or a chromatic light it'll actually shift in Hue from Blue to something almost purple and with enough light eventually white this happens not just to Blue but to varying magnitudes the full spectrum of visual color to look deeper into what happens as color receives more value particularly in film I'll show you some color sweeps with permission from artist jko uni first up let's look at a color sweep sweep from an Airy cinema camera now these cameras have been standard in cinema for decades so a quick note here I'm talking about an Airy camera color sweep for Simplicity but what I'm really talking about is far more complex with heaps of variables it has to do a specific film chemicals used on and to process that film let's look at that sweep as a starting point for understanding how this iconic camera captures and displays color again on the left is the visible color spect as we travel right horizontally value is increased you can see how color from the Airy film material reacts with light in different ways saturation decreases at different rates across the visual Spectrum the abne effect is at play as color Hues shift in non absolutes you could see how it's not uniform now let's take a look at the way blender's old default filmic transforms the same color information as you can see filmic is holding on to saturation in a more uniform p pattern at a glance you might look at this and say great this is predictable this must be accurate the result is a lot of this color ends up in the yellow cyan magenta space I'll show you what a practical example of this looks like in just a minute so one more before we look at the sweep from agx the next one is Asus just look at what happens as more value is added colors lose saturation at varying rates along the Spectrum if we compare that to the single Airy sweep in filmic the bis sweep in many ways is manipulating or transforming color info more closely to what might happen with the film in the Airy camera and finally let's look at the agx transform as you can clearly see it's a pretty dang good option if what we're going for is simulating what might happen with arguably Superior methods of image formation like film in an Airy camera now it's worth mentioning I did not create these sweeps I did not have my hands physically on on an Airy camera but what I'm relying on here is data from sources that I trust scientific data only gets us so far with relative perception this is where I have to stop the conversation around scientific accuracy we've talked about relative perception I've given some limited scientific info but really this video is entirely backwards because none of this none of this matters without the Practical results not from me but from you download the latest version of blender right right now that's version 4.0 use agx yourself give it a chance in a few projects and see if you just take my word and you say all right Riley told me agx is better I guess that's what I'm using now that's too much pressure to put on me at some point you'll need to take responsibility for the choices you make around your own image formation I can't possibly be responsible for whether or not you like a particular tool and I'll show you a practical example but please just please try it out for yourself before you start hating on this video for whatever reason so here we have two images identical scenes but one was rendered using filmic and the other with agx here's the scene in blender simply two spheres a seamless background and an intense acromatic light source Illuminating the backdrop we also have some simple fill light from an hdri check out the color sweep in action the light Illuminating the background is pure white light filmic holds on to the the magenta color in a uniform way even as more bright white light is introduced agx on the other hand is closer to the sweep I showed from something like the Aries cinema camera and this is all totally relative you might say Riley I like filmic more and to that I'd say you're not wrong I don't agree with you for this image but you're not wrong all agx is doing here for me is it's providing my mind with more visual context it's giving the image for me more readability in a way that makes sense more specifically it's giving us a greater gradient of difference arguably providing us with more significant context into the intensity of the light source again though you've got your own pipeline to think about and you need to try this out for yourself some artists are still creating with 8bit pixel art that doesn't mean it's bad art it just means they're using a tool that they like and that works for them and filmic might be the tool that you stick with for years to come on the other hand a GX might revolutionize your Productions to say that this is better than filmic totally throws everything we talked about at the start out the window but hey at least now you know enough to make a decision on your own that's all I have for you uh thanks for learning about agx with me I did a lot of research for this video if you want to support what I'm doing support the Productions that I'm making not just the educational content but also the 3D asset library that I'm creating as well as the more informal trainings that I have over an offal Depot please again consider going to click the link and subscribing at least for the lowest tier uh that's all the pressure I want to put on you if you can afford it it would definitely help me out and help out the artists that I'm hiring and Contracting as we go plus you totally just watch this whole video so it's kind of awkward if you don't go click the link uh you owe me now okay thanks for watching and I'll hopefully catch you on the next one

Channel: Riley Brown

Views: 13,393

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Id: GfhPjeZFNVo

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2023