I had other things to do after july till now. What happend with Filmic? Suddenly threads are stopping around July 2017. The hype went to Blender 2.8 and micro-roughness?
Is there still developement around the integration of Filmic in Blender or fixing Blender qua colormanagement?
Or we don’t care anymore that Blender is broken qua colormanagement?
Filmic is in master now (check the color management panel and choose the ‘filmic’ transform).
I think Bartek is right. We should be able to evaluate the render data without the shaper, and have the option to plug it through a CDL node, instead of having to go through the contrast presets first.
Now there is no difference between setting the look to ‘None’ or setting ‘Base Contrast’
It’s more idiot proof to have it on all the time, but less flexible, and it should really be implemented as a node. I’m guessing node based colour management is going to way more difficult to implement than just applying it to everything once at the end of the pipe.
It’s very nice to have it built in to 2.79 as it is right now, at least as a starting point. I do agree however that the implementation could be better. Right now it seems to me that the devs might be trying to make the transition easier for those who are used to doing things with the old color settings, or simply don’t want filmic for some reason. Hopefully this can change in the future so that filmic can be better implemented, and so that ‘None’ and ‘Base Contrast’ won’t be the exact same thing, which is just strange.
Are you saying we should be able to view it in straight linear -> sRGB, like the default view is now, or am I misunderstanding?
Basically, you’re wanting to use the CDL node to create the contrast you want with the scene linear values and have that piped directly to the display right?
If that is correct, you can do that, it can just be messy and take a bit of manual work. I think this is part of what filmic was designed to do honestly, as Troy has stated that his main goal for filmic was to get people to think about color more deeply.
Having it on always is a good place to start I think, as hopefully it will fulfill the above goal of getting more people to be conscious of their color management. And the flexibility is still there, it just takes extra work.
I agree that node based color management would difficult to implement, mostly because of the workflow already established in the compositing nodes in blender, which is a bit messy imo. The pros and cons of having it node based vs similar to how it is now would be an interesting discussion.
I would support doing all of the color management in the compositor if Blender had the ability to do one thing.
That thing would be the ability to pipe the results through the compositor and back to the render window while the render is in progress (ie. you seeing the composited result taking shape in real time). Obviously, this wouldn’t be practical for things like different render layers, so the code would have to decide which parts of the tree it can execute (such as parts that grade the color). This should also be done for Cycles viewport rendering as well and for Eevee rendering in 2.8.
The reasons for that is that having the pre-managed image only during the rendering phase would make it much harder to make sure the scene looks the way you want it as it forms in the render window (and so it would make it far more difficult to decide whether to carry on with the render or cancel it). I believe it’s far more intuitive to artists to be able to see what they are going to get without having to wait until the render is done.
Yes, I knew that and did some experiments with that extensively a few months ago.
That time it turned out more or less that we have to experiment ourselves to figure out what parts are broken and figure out a good worklow in order to use Filmic properly.
Now that Filmic is implemented, I believe there are no plans to implement it further properly.
And also: we have a nice tool (Filmic), but many doesn’t really know how to use it unless you are a colorist. (and a good one).
Sigh, blender was such a nice tool of which we didn’t realise it was broken. And it’s still an amazing tool but we know now it’s broken. (Qua colormanagement).
What’s not to know? You set it to your preferred contrast or you export log encoded image to color grade somewhere else which is just fancy words for adjusting color of an image that is rendered in low contrast so it contains all the detail in high dynamic range scene. You use 16bit TIFF format because EXR does not save color transforms. That is it. Some parts of Blender are broken, but they are getting better every day.
Current implementation needs to be fixed, but it’s a 2 minute job for the user to set it up manually. It’s all good. And I bet it is going to be improved in the future. There is no reason to believe otherwise at the moment.
I always treat filmic just as a simple way to view more of the scene. In the viewport everything looks kinda washed out and greyish. Final rendering is always to exr, so no color transform applied. Then I grade and composite in Fusion, either applying the filmic transform again or using some other tonemapping operator plus manual grading.
This should be a bit less so if you remember to use filmic-compliant materials and lighting (ie. diffuse values are much lower than you use for sRGB and the lights are much brighter than you would use for sRGB).
And I know Troy has said many times that the curve widget Blender uses for color management is broken, but I have used it in combination with tweaking the gamma and it removes the need for me to wait until after the render is done and using the CDL node in the compositor (and the result remains far better than plain sRGB).
For me, it’s less in the way of worry about obeying the science of color management as opposed to the final image looking quite good with no clear burnout (ie. saturated colors in highlights), accurate materials, and good illumination and contrast.
I can live with that. Good idea to approach it that way.