Hey guys,
I just had a question regarding ACES vs filmic. I’ve done some tests which I’m not sure how good they are between rendering with ACES and filmic. However bringing my renders into nuke they are basically indistinguishable from each other. Is cycle’s basically rendering an ACES colorspace by default just without the name?
I’ve been rendering and exporting openEXRs to nuke for my tests and the colour values and look of the images are basically identical while using ACES inside of nuke.
Any clarification would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Mitchell
No. Cycles saves linear space images in the OpenEXR files, without any transforms.
So when you open the EXR on Nuke and then apply transforms thru ACES, does not matter if you do that on Blender or Nuke.
Same way that you can exactly replicate the sRGB Filmic look Blender gives you on Nuke or Fusion by simply converting EXR to Filmic Log and then to sRGB using Blender OCIO setup.
That’s why Troy says, we need to understand better what’s going on. ACES is intended to have a workflow to easily mix footage from different sources and have it all look consistent.
What ACES is not is a colorgrading tool picked because it “looks better” than Filmic.
People is using ACES, Filmic, etc. without truly understanding what things are. Example, using the camera LUT that existed in 2.79b as LUT to convey moods.
This being said, and while ACES is not flawless and indeed Blender needs fixes to support the ACES pipeline fully, Blender needs it to some extent.
But needs a proper implementation.