How to Render in ACES! | Maya / Arnold

I guess everyone wants better-looking renders I will be talking about the Aces workflow and what to do and what not to do now you can see my comparison here about those two images where I first had well as I thought I was using aces and what I changed in my render settings in my notes to get to a more sophisticated render which is more interesting it has less clamped values it's just overall looking nicer in my opinion so I will show you the process how I achieved these render results and obviously you can do that with any other renderer which supports aces color workflow and the open image i/o setup hello everyone and welcome along to another episode of the rendering workflow called aces I've been showing you this before in a previous tutorial well we're always going about the Aces settings and everything you would need to consider to get better looking images it was a while ago so in the meantime I was getting more comfortable with that and I was learning more things I was talking to people who helped me to understand all this a bit more and I will be trying to teach you what I have been doing wrong and what you can do to get directly looking better images so why don't we look again at the comparison of my initial render which I showed them in my previous video and what I have now and let's just compare exactly what what is the difference so this year is my original render I had a while back and you can see just overall that everything looks a bit too bright or clammed you can see it very clearly on the image here of Captain Marvel and you can also see it on the chair so everything is just it feels like as if the color is breaking or clipping right so if I compare this to the new render you can see we have way richer colors it's it's not oversaturated anymore it just looks a bit better and even on the chairs you can see that it actually retain some color and it's not as bright or clamp as it was before and also a big difference is you can see on the floor right the floor has a completely different color obviously always doing something wrong in setup it's not it's not just checking a render setting and that boomin it looks better I had to first fully understand what I was doing only then I could actually know or know exactly what IDT's or input colors I would work for as I need to be choosing so and one important resource I can recommend to anyone who gets we wants to get more familiar with color or aces and just in general lighting look Devin all these things I can highly recommend the blog or book from Christopher John it's a website right now and you will find the link in the description below and this is mainly my research I was looking for obviously he has lots of sources and links which I read as well which is super interesting if you want to get more familiar than that and I was using that totally to get into more familiar with this Asus things right so lots of things to talk about lots of things to ingest here so it is for everyone who watches this right now should at least read through this book just to understand the overall benefit you would have with aces yeah and then from there on I guess you we can just go along and it makes everything makes a bit more sense afterwards alright so let's jump into the first thing which i think is highly important for you to be up-to-date and to know that you have the latest config file from open color io and the correct Asus version in my previous video I was using aces 1.03 which has been the standard for a bit now it got updated not too long ago but I just thought why would I need to change everything is working as it is right now right so on Chris's blog or a book you can totally see a very distinct difference between one point 1.03 and one point one and the reason is the the dynamic range has been updated with a shaper dynamic ranges like a it's essentially just a wider dynamic range which which encompasses just more range in the whole gamut so you can see now here that this random with the blue yellow and red spheres this is rendered using aces and display rec709 and this is the same render with the asus 1.03 config just exposed up we can see that there's some really weird things going on it always gets purplish and there's like a strong hard line in aces 1.03 with the 1.1 version you can see that it's there's a super big difference especially on the red zone on the blues so that is one thing to keep in mind to be always up to date so if you're if you're not you might have issues with color saturation and some clamping Millis which I faced in my previous video to my new ones so there's a big change I changed everything to 1.1 and I could totally see a difference already so keep that in mind the next big point I would want to make is to understand the difference between an OTT and an IDT the ODT is the output display transform which means that's pretty much what the render is outputting right so if we go to Maya's render settings or in any case color management settings you can see that under the color management my view transform oh my oh D T is set to P 3 D 60 and I have that set up because my monitor supports that gamut right or this this transform most of your monitors we'll have srgb so you would have something different here you would have output srgb something similar to that so I'm using the rendering space aces and my OD T is my P 3d 60 which is the same what my monitor supports the IDT the input display transform is the colored transform you put in to the render so if you know that you will be rendering a internet texture which is an sRGB your IDT would need to be set up accordingly so the conversion is happening correctly and you don't have any wit color shifts and something like that so that's very important to know the difference of ODT and IDT and i can recommend you to read it up on on the book as well as super detailed and you should know very easily what the difference is by that for the next point i wanted to make sure that you guys know that there is a linear workflow and there's this the asus workflow up to now i guess most of the people have been working in linear workflow which means that you work in a linear srgb gama your colors are still linearized so you don't render with an with a gamma curve of to point to apply to your texture so you still convert that to a linear space and render that and this is super important that at least you should be doing that right so to get the linear workflow done but now if there were new technique aces you know a lot wider gamut to to work with so the renderer has a lot more range to play with and that's where the Aces workflow comes in handy it just gives the renderer more information to deal with colors that's why in cases where you switch from a linear srgb gama workflow to an Asus workflow you will see that there is just more color there's more bounces going on and this is the reason for that and it's important that you know that linear workflow is not the same as Asus directly right one major thing I had issues with is choosing the right IDT and I messed up quite a few times in my previous video and this is the reason why these colors here got clamped I was using the wrong ID t for these things I I got these textures from the internet but I didn't set my ID t properly so I think for this case exactly I had it still on ACC G and that's like there was always almost like a double transform happening and that's where my colors got messed up in the next render because I learned that there was a progression and there was definitely some some time in between and now it's totally obvious to me but I changed the IDT to to respect that so it's no utility sRGB texture which is what you should I should have been using and that's why it looks better and it's not really clamped anymore and for the floor the same same deal I was using the wrong wrong ITT that's why my colors got messed up and with the right IDT you can actually pump more light into the scene and you get like a better bounce so this is super important to understand that and I if you have any questions about that right what how do I know what i editi to use feel free to leave a comment below and ask questions there's lots of people who are happy to help so please check that out as well now let's talk about t x-files and different runners as te x-files or t x-files it's just like a like a compact map of your render textures and if in your render settings you have Auto conversion on sometimes they will be replaced but if they if it finds the TX file for that already on disk it will not rewrite that file so whenever you change your ID T in your file nodes make sure you delete and recreate your TX files it happened to me so often that I forgot to regenerate them that I changed the ID T and then I was expecting oh yeah it's changed now this is correct but it actually was reading the TX files in the background which still had the wrong idea T baked in so that I just want to make the point super clear that be aware that when you're using TX files that you always update them and make sure whenever you change your ID T you recreate them it's super important let's jump right into Maya now or any other renderer which supports this kind of ASIS workflow and by the way the scene here which I be using is available on my patreon account as for the source files and what I have new now if you look below there's like this little join button if you join that you have also access to the source files of not just this video but of all my previous videos I did so it's at least like 15 videos with all the content for that so keep that in mind if you want to support me I would HIGHLY appreciate that in here we you can see now that we have a setup I'm not saying this is right but this is at least this was my starting point of my last video so here are a few issues and I just want to make them super clear what's what's going on here right now I have a single wall texture with a mid gray like it with 0.5 McCrae and aces this value is at 2.1 for right so this is converted to the rendering space a CCG so my picking color now picking a role is utility srgb which is whatever you you see on in the internet this is the color you would see so 50% gray represents in aces 2.14 which is fine on film sets you can also use point one eight which is like a reflectance value of eighteen percent this is what people tend to use as well or what I have to which I use quite a bit and I still use that value as well it's just a bit darker there's not not a huge difference but there is a little difference so 0.5 again and right now I'm just lighting this scene with a simple HDR I got that from HDI heaven and you will have access to this file as well if you need to and all I have and my final note is and this is the big mistake I did before this is said because I thought oh it's it's linear anyways I just put this two aces CG and we'd be done with that right so this was a big problem I had already so if I switch this now to what it's supposed to be which should be utility Linea srgb this guy here this is the right the right color space to use for Hg is unless they were captured and or converted pre converted to a CCG thing now I change the I DT now right so I hit play again I can also do a force refresh of the scene and we shouldn't see a difference because my render settings are set to use existing TX textures so you can see there is no difference between those two files obviously the render settings or render quality but other than that there is no difference what is important as I said before you need to go to your text files either delete them from the disk or go to the TX manager here so you just need to find your TX file in the TX manager and make sure you delete the file like that so now it's gone and just recreate that and you can see that the color color space is updated there as well right so I'm just creating the TX file now and it takes a bit of time and once that's generated we will just restart the render and by the way I'm using the GPU for this Arnold GPU super fast I've got a pretty good rate so it's fun it's definitely fun using the denoise version as well directly right it might not be obvious at first but you can see that there is a color jump now you can see that before it was very warm and saturated and without it it's more like bluish or it feels more neutralized and this is very important that what if you don't do the color space correctly your H your eyes will be oversaturated and this is what I had before as well everything was I don't know what it was it was just looking odd so keep that in mind that's super important to make sure you got this right as well so now my HDI is in the right space right you can see it's not as saturated anymore you can even see it here on the leaves actually it's a lot better to see it here and on the truck before and after right it's super saturated versus a more neutral color and that's the way you need to go right and now let's find a bit more issues with IDT's so let's just bring in the floor here which I was just hiding for this for the HDI thing but before I just want to hide my skylight I just I just wanted to show you how to convert hgo eyes correctly for my image here I was actually using a sky dome light a physical sky and a directional light for this so let's just unhide and refresh the render and the reason for that is I just had a bit more flexibility by using directional lights and this I could also do like a double double Sun here just to get a softer feel towards the edges it's it's you can achieve that by adjusting the turbidity and your sky but anyways this is now my lighting so let's just bring in the floor right now shift h bring that in and right now again this is the mistake I did before I had the wrong idea obviously right now it makes total sense so this is what it looks like with the wrong I DT let's just store this image and convert it properly so I know that the diffuse here the diffuse color should be set to utility srgb so utility srgb texture for my diffuse and for my bump map also it's I was I was thinking that it needs to be srgb because I knew normal Maps roughness maps bump maps they all should be linear but my I had it wrong it needs to be utility linear srgb because this is in the linear color space right all right so now obviously if I think I just render no it's it's not the same obviously need to recreate my TX files so let's do that let's just delete them and once they deleted we just recreate them create TX files all right and now you can see that just by doing the right conversion we have the correct colors now you can see the flow looks actually a lot nicer we get the nice reflections back and everything feels a lot more grounded I would say all right so let's just do one more let's just fairly quick bring in those poster boards and make sure that we have the correct IDT's there as well and you can see how how important it is to to nail this one right you can see wrong color space is super oversaturated everything and I talked in the introduction about that so what we need to do now is just bring in the file nodes we can just select all three of them and then again let's just quickly convert them stop the render make sure that you have in the right the right IDT which is I guess you know by now it should be a srgb one so utility srgb texture this one let's use the same one as well and if you hit R if you click and hit R it jumps to roll and then it's fairly quick to get the srgb it's a bit little it's a faster little way to do that little little tip here so go to textures utility TX manager find these weird ones delete them and recreate them which just converts them again to the correct color space right so I guess you know the drill and if I just update my render now we should see that there is there will be a nice that jump from this oversaturated color to the more like a less clamp and just better-looking one let's see you can see I didn't store the image I was just too slow to store it but you can totally see that it looks just correct right so keep that in mind you can see how how important these kind of things are the next thing I want to talk about is clamping and it was touched up in and Chris's book as well it's super important that you do not clamp your indirect values because if you do it your renderer will not have the correct information or not enough information to actually render proper colors and you can see that I the default settings for my or at least for Arnold are to use clamping and it's it makes sense to have it on because it will get al it will get rid of a lot of fireflies but again it will clamp your values right so you told you wanna disable that especially for interior lights where you have lots of lots of lights bouncing around and you need to have the accurate color representation so this is now our image and by default let's clamp 210 which is okay in most of the cases so what I want to do now I just want to zoom in this corner here and I just want to change the clamping let's say I go up to a thousand and now you did you did not see much of a change but there is a subtle change you can see that when it's on like my proof the 10 clamping you can see this is the color I have and without it like if I clamp only at a thousand you see there's more color it's it's a bit more saturated it might be very subtle in the recording but on my monitor I can clearly see that and it might be because I have a bit wider gamut to play with I'm using p.3d 60 to display my images here it gets more apparent if you have more bounces and also more energy in your scene and now this is the full image with clamping at ten and a thousand and you can see it's there is a change in in warmth it's a bit warmer it's there's just a bit more color going on it's subtle but it's totally there you can see there is a shift so keep that in mind and I had a client I had the clamping on so I was losing quite a bit of color and the next important thing I want to talk about is the raid F so on default its oh pretty much I think the default is two bounces on and you can see already like this is actually what it's supposed to be two bounces as the default setting and you can see it's it's a bit dark or it's not dark but these edges they get super like crunchy I would say and it's important that you have enough balance is to compensate for the light bouncing to light up your scene and bounces get heavy it will slow down your render but it will make them look a lot more natural because in nature there is no clamping or limiting to any values right it's it's bouncing infinitely until it loses its energy right so this is pretty much an optimization which we have in the render engines to keep our renders performance but if you want to go for looks and you want to make a great render we should obviously find a nice balance that you do not have to little bounces so we can jump into this corner again and just render this region and go back to render settings and let's just have ten bounces as we had before actually let's see and you can see there's a slight change in color so we can try to push it even further and it will get more pan rafi if you use correct textures on your wall right now I'm still working with my gray value here of a mid mid gray but if you look around and you have white walls they're pretty wide and it's and that color range is around point seven point eight in and value right so you can go definitely higher here and your your image will get a lot brighter just because there's so much energy or like so much light in your scene and and now the bounces will be super apparent you can see no it looks like we have super white painted walls and this is accurate this is like if the Sun would be shining in your apartment it is that bright right the only thing is we have ten bounces now if I go back down to two you should see everything is is not as bright it's a blitz a slightly slightly grayish I would say so if I boost it back up to ten in terms of my samples where we kind of a bit further on 12 you should see that there it just it looks more natural you can see the corners are not that crunchy anymore there's more bounce going on and even like the floor and everything it just looks nicer right so I just want to iterate over these points that it's very important that you know what kind of values you are inputting that you know what kind of input colors you are setting so it's super important that you are aware of what the IDT's are what the OD T's are what your monitor can do how many bounces you have if your scene is clipping the values or clamping the values all these kind of things are very important and let's just for the final final step here bringing all the elements and render that all right now you can see that the render is working as expected with the all the objects in the scene this is what we get and I just don't have my darker wall here so we can totally do that if we need to just changing the color on the side wall right now it's still white on Chris's book there's also very neat a color chart albedo child which you can use if you know if you want to get rough estimates of colors so for like a black color wall you can use acrylic paint or something like that it's around in reflectance of 0.04 like 4% reflectance charcoal is 3% so it's a lot less light is coming back so we can try some values between 0.04 and point oh eight maybe just to see if we get something nice so right now the value for that wall is fully one and we want to change in the ASIS space so we want to work in the rendering space and make sure that we have a value of 0.04 which should resemble the charcoal look or this darker material we can may make it a little bit brighter if you don't want to go fully this dark 0.8 maybe we can increase the roughness because the wall is not super specky and this would be now the render with a darker wool and you can see just by changing the backboard color how the light is heard the whole scene is being affected right you can see there there's a lot less white balance going on that's why my scene is not as super bright as before we didn't change anything else we just brought in we just change the color of this backboard and this is the result of that and for this I think I also had the wrong value on this as well it actually has a texture connected to it which might be this is correct srgb and that's linear so these two are correct for for this ladder here on the left but I think I was tweaking the weight and this is something I because it it was looking too bright if I didn't change that so if I bring this back to one the ladder will look like this and if I have my roughness also like my expect color on one as well like that this is what the ladder would look like but then look thinking about it a bit it looks like it's almost metal now it's just too bright but I was thinking about it and if the Sun shines so strong directly on the black surface which is pretty much like a compressed wood or something if you buy go to Ikea buy these these ladders or some shelves or whatever and the Sun shines directly on them they do not look pitch-black they actually look raised so this here is correct and you can fairly easily test that if you just disable the strong light so let's say the the Sun has been rotated I'm just hiding the Sun so the Sun has set we just have the sky left so now you can see that everything in the scene is pretty damn dark and this is because there is no light anymore uuugh we can still see the the sky reflecting because I didn't change that yet but all the rest feels still supernatural so if I bring that back with the Sun is back and you can see now the whole effect of the Sun hitting the scene I hope you like the new way I am doing my videos especially with my new intro video help you like that actually and just that I'm more present in the and the videos I'm trying to explain a bit more in-depth so please leave me a thumbs up if you like what I do and also if you have not subscribed to my channel it means a lot to me if you would do so and for existing subscribers make sure the Bell is on right so if the Bell is on you will always get notified whenever I publish or add a new video on my channel and what I didn't talk about is my discord channel or a server which is growing superfast within two weeks time we already had 600 members and the numbers are going still up so super impressive there the community is growing we have render challenges so if you want to be a bit more competitive if you want to see how other would do others would do renders there's a little channel on the server where you can submit your posts and people will get feedback so it's a pretty nice interactive community and I would be happy if you guys would join me there and all the others obviously which are on that as well so I want to thank you guys for tuning in and and looking again at me talking about aces and I'm pretty sure I still messed up a few things you never know I'm still learning as I'm going and maybe I will do another revisit about this topic so just keep keep being posted on my channel and I just want to thank you guys for looking at my and me talking and everything so thanks again and I will see you guys in the next episode [Music]

Channel: Arvid Schneider

Views: 37,484

Rating: 4.9371071 out of 5

Keywords: vray, mantra, redshift, octane, renderman, cycles, arvid schneider, vfx, arnold, 3d modelling, 3d texturing, lookdev, rendering, 3d rendering, lighting, 3d lighting, maya tutorial, visual effects, vfx artists, vfx tutorial, vfx effects, 3d tutorial, render, surfacing, shading, 3d render, denoiser, tutorial, solidangle, autodesk, arnold renderer, maya arnold, maya arnold tutorial, maya, autodesk maya, maya 2020, maya 2022, maya 3d, aces, arnold houdini, arnoldrenderer, arnold render

Id: RKW9Y1hMx1o

Length: 28min 12sec (1692 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2020