Are you saying that Filmic-side image is fake?
It demonstrates nicely the curse of the Notorious Six, where hues become increasingly constrained to the six extremal values (Red Yellow Green Cyan Blue Magenta) as more and more intense light has to be mapped into the closed domain (i.e. where you can’t exceed 1)
Filmic, fwiw, is actually fairly robust compared to other approaches similar to it when it comes to that, but eventually it simply has to break.
AgX is a different approach that completely avoids this issue. No matter how bright you push your values, hues will remain reasonably distinguishable, until the light becomes so bright, that it turns white.
Just because it’s bad in some scenarios it doesn’t mean the others are any better, at least there is no hue shifting with highlights in Filmic compared to sRGB, and the results are much nicer. The workaround for me was a custom “desaturate highlights” in the compositor, which I used from time to time if needed. But I can say that Filmic was still the best approach so far
Pedantic point perhaps, but the lighting conditions as such are not to blame. It’s how they are mapped, or more precisely, how the image is formed given the data of the virtual sensor readouts as they hit the camera.
AgX is gonna be more forgiving in a sense though, allowing more kinds of lighting to end up looking good or at least acceptable
Simply get the latest version of Blender once it’s out, or a preview build of it.
Or you can find the AgX config somewhere and replace the corresponding files the Colormanagement folder in your Blender version
Yeah, that setup overall is your lighting.
It gets rendered as what amounts to sensor readouts in the camera (stored as an exr), and then mapped to the actual final image through color management (as some sort of end format)
The underlying exr file is the exact same in all four images. The difference is, that those values, the “raw data” if you will, gets mapped to the actual image in different ways depending on your color management settings
More importantly, it will allow accurate real-world lighting values to look good, because the tones you see are being modeled on how we see colors behaving in the real world.
Having accuracy in values like sunlight is a huge deal, because you otherwise have lamp values far below where they should be which translates to extremely poor indirect illumination (ie. you are not getting the real world ‘glow’ that results from bright lighting). Attempting to mitigate this with brighter albedo values can be done, but it is very hard to control and makes it a lot tougher to get nice glossy and scattering effects.
You have any concrete examples? I consider filmic to mimic film emulsion where desaturation occurs, although overexposure - especially if severe - also adds noise. To me filmic, and I guess AgX but I haven’t played with it yet, is a no brainer and no click approach to tone mapping. Only in a single project and a single output have I had to resort to additional tonemapping (in Krita, of all places) to get back some lost details that was considered critical. With filmic, sure, saturation is lost, but I’d expect that.
I also use nishita sun&sky in combination with internal lights (color temperatured and then overall white balanced to suit), and I have no idea what the problem is supposed to be.
I don’t think the examples above are great at all. Not even sure why None is included, and RGB needs to be tone mapped. But more importantly, we’re dealing with pure RGB lighting that doesn’t exist naturally in a RGB renderer rather than a spectral renderer. Try to illuminate a real cylinder with a red laser and I’m pretty sure the result would be horrific as well. Hmm, would actually be a cool experiment.
There is only so much we can do about mapping pure single wavelength colors into an image that is supposed to have nothing more saturated than sRGB, yes.
However, you’ll find that AgX will handle even those cases far more gracefully than Filmic
I think it is because of the extreme lighting used in the test.
Using white or slightly tinted light (sun and sky or HDRIs) usually doesn’t give such issues
I did another test with “normal” lighting conditions, where I was paying more attention to the difference in Colors (red, blue and their derivatives are affected more then Green).
In general each of the pure Red, Green and Blue images look better with AgX.
However, once you get to the last combo images, AgX looks very flat and washed out. At which point I think Standard looks better. Of course that’s not to say its technically correct, but lets face it, the look of most movies isn’t ‘technically’ correct either.
