I like how you post an example where 100% of new users changed a default to justify not changing the default for new users.
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I sort of find it funny/sad that the best advice given for AGX seems to be âyouâre supposed to refine it in compositing.â
Like most new users immediately think âThis looks screwed, so I guess I should use compositing.â
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Just because I have âperpetual Blender noobâ in my bio doesnât mean most people will â six months in is usually getting past the ânew userâ stage.
But these perpetually ânewâ users change that default by the hour after a few days of being comfortable.
Want a logo on the side of this building with the shadows interacting realistically, standard. Want to brainstorm camera angles and props for the next photoshoot, filmic (or maybe agx). 6 more of the other 30 things they do today might involve blender and it could easily be 2 in filmic and 4 in standard and all go through photoshop to fix something. Blender is just a glorified photoshop perspective transform or a glorified drop shadow effect or a poor mans keyshot and the default doesnât matter, because they use each option as needed, because they need to use each option, daily.
Not sure and in many ways donât care.
What I will say is that to my eye, the left one looks âwrongâ while the right one looks better.
Iâm basing that on two things. First the left one is more âwashedâ out in a bit of an over bright sort of way, something that a lot of CGI images can suffer from.
But worse is the hand, the left image just has that classic too yellow/orange look of a sick person or bad NTSC TV colour conversionâŚ
Right Agx? It is darker (agx normal tends to be darker) and the colour of the hand.
The left one vears to orange yellow, right more pink.
There also seems to be a deeper range of values in the right one.
The left looks âflatâ the right jumps out at me.
I prefere the right.
Love the irony.
It also shows the potential flexibility and ability to adapt of new users.
Many people might actually underestimate them (not to mention that they arenât an uniform mass of people that react all the same).
Many wonât but they certainly SHOULD.
BTW I donât care what tone mapping you apply, this is true for all of them (including using none).
PS: How many of you use Light groups and then fine-tune the colors in post rather than fiddling with it and render it multiple times?
I use light groups, and the final render is basically exactly where I want it color-wise. Most of the post I do is either for effects (neon glow, blur and tweak a reflection pass, etc), or occasionally an overall bright/gamma levels tweak. I canât recall the last time I did a color re-balance in post.
Yup right one is Agx, maybe the scene looks better because it was built using Agx.
We should do comparison with more complex scenes than just gradients to show how Agx is working
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Maybe I should have explained a little better this bit.
Moving the slider the filmic image seems to âcome upâ but it flattens.
The AGX version gives more sense of perspective and depth.
I think that is important for me, it is a good example.
The AGX version to me feels more ârealâ.
A lot of the discussion is centered on emisive materials and their saturation. This example is more âreal worldâ.
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That is the ideal case.
Unfortunately my current project is a pure stress-test for any renderer:
Night, tons of atmospheric fog, rain, smoke, neon lights in the distance.
As you can imagine, making artistic choices in regards to color becomes very painful if it takes several minutes to render a frame.
So I just render white lights in Blender (in separate light groups), color them in post and then bring the color information back to the light so that it matches the comp result.
The thing is - nothing is accurate at representing human perception. There are no systems or hardware to do so âaccuratelyâ. Also perception is a funny thing. âGood enoughâ here is just absolutely awesome.
I donât think you fully understand how this works. Itâs a hard problem. There is no perfect solution and you have to sacrifice some things in order to get others. Maybe you can design a color transform that is better. I think you should give it a go before all this criticism.
If you look into it, you will realise, that AgX is really bringing a lot more benefits than this weird fixation on one hue being slightly different is a problem. Itâs not a serious problem at all in reality(for workflows this is supposed to be for(not necessarily for you)). Other methods sacrifice a whole lot of colors at some brightness. They just disappear and you cannot see them at all as they are collapsed to only 6 colors. See this video - the guy seems to explain it in a quite clear way.
there are clearly quite significant changes and people have been noticing and were not happy with
This doesnât actually seem to be true with AgX. There seem to be only very few people unhappy about it, and some who donât understand it and then people who donât need it as they need something else. People who need it actually tend to be happy with it from what I see. It seems there are a lot of us.
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True, I think itâs a good thing to have as a clear option like left click / right click select. Put the color management as a dropdown in the first run splash screen with notes for which use cases
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Then itâs odd to justify something that can be measured with mathematical data, with something that is subjective and perceptual.
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I understand that. I understand it because I made a bunch of visualizations of Filmic and AgX. Thatâs why I know that the hue shift I am talking about does not exist in Filmic (for smaller numbers), but it is curved differently for AgX depending for each color.
Which problems does it solve, that requires this kind of unpredictable hue shift?
The only one I have seen so far (pixelgrip pointed it out) was a de Abney correction. But I am not yet sure how much of an effect this has, because I didnât have the time yet to look more closely into it.
The issue is that it has been decided for the whole Blender community what the default workflow is supposed to be.
Maybe it helps to read the thread of the AgX development.Here you can see why this hue shift happens and why its not a easy correction.
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This statement is wrong. Itâs just a default. Itâs not such a big deal. Itâs common knowledge one can save any file with any settings as their default. This also comes from a disrespectful assumption that the whole Blender community is clueless and fragile bunch of victims who donât know what they are doing. I donât think thatâs very nice. There are many capable people here who are not bothered by this at all even if AgX does not match their workflows of even personal preference.
Thanks for the reference!
I have tried to find information in there, but it is a massive thread, so I really appreciate the link.
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In my world, the default is a good starting point, a good default that covers a lot of use cases.
Last time I checked, artists really like to have the control over what they are producing. AgX undoubtedly makes it more difficult. I wouldnât have a problem at all if there were better ways to get the desired outcomes with the help of the compositor, but apparently it is not good enough (at least no one could explain to me how I could use it).
The solution apparently is to use other software for compositing, which is without doubt not in the spirit of Blender at all.
In my view a huge portion of the issue is the lack of information about AgX. I literally have to figure out what the heck it is doing on my own to understand why it is not behaving in the way I would it expect to. What I could find is that has better color handling in over-exposed areas. That is a bit minimalistic for my taste.
I donât feel like a victim at all. This is a critique about the decisions which were made.
But as clueless and fragile victim, I am not sure whether I am worthy of further communicating with someone like you.