3 LCS workflows for LW

#4

Thank you for the feedback guys!

Abuminalis, HDRI3D magazine is not full of advertising, believe me. Every article is really top notch and not only for LW users since it covers a wide spectrum of the CG industry and visual arts. It comes with info that we won’t find on web - and that’s the idea of its articles :slight_smile: Anyway, you can always get the Issue in which you are only interested.

Nikfaulkner, Glad to see you are aware about the advantages of LCS workflows.

Just for people not familiarized with LCS workflows, it’s good they know that there’s only advantages in to switch to these workflows. If you have realized you need a lot of tweak to get a realistic shading, or you have some flickering problems in animation, or if you can’t get that evasive bokeh effect, or if your real fresnel shading in reflections doesn’t look so “real”, or if still you have problems to integrate through HDRI lighting that CG element with this real footage, or if color bleeds aren’t so clean, or if you are getting too contrasted images and you want a ‘v-ray look’, or if brightness attenuates when you use mblur, or if you have some AA problems in textures… then, you might be interested in to implement a LCS workflow for your own work.

But not only that, let’s say you are working for film, or print, or TV, or web or for all of them and as it’s obvious, you have realized colors doesn’t look the same in your computer than in the video monitor, or in the theater screen, or in that printed illustration. How to keep color consistency as much as possible from medium to medium? or let’s say you want your CG short has a “film look” even if you are displaying it on a video monitor or TV, we can do that? if so, how? or let’s say you see a banding effect when you display your sequence in a projector, but you don’t see it in your computer monitor; there’s a way to get rid off those annoying banding effects? or let’s say you are working in hi-res for print; there’s a way to convert that result sucessfully to CMYK, or even more, there is a way to work with a CMYK pantone within LW? These questions are answered with a proper color management workflow.

If some of you have some of these questions, you might find interesting my articles in Issue# 18 and Issue# 19 for HDRI3D magazine :slight_smile:

Gerardo

#5

is the issue out on the newstands yet (On the east coast)? theres one Barnes And Noble in the area here that carries it and its like 20 miles away. heh

  • Will.
#6

i ordered it from their site yesterday, should only take about a month to get to sunny england :slight_smile:

#7

Thanks for putting out the massive amount of work something like this takes to complete :thumbsup: I’ll be grabbing a copy of #18 and #19.

#8

Looks good but when I checked the order/subscription page I could only get #19 :sad:…I can’t afford it anyway:cry:…maybe I could borrow your’s nikfaulkner?:smiley:

#9

Will Cameron, I’m asking if it’s already shipping on the West Coast, I’ll let you know barely I know

Nik Faulkner, Next Issue #19 is programmed by April, so a month is not so much time :slight_smile:

Biliousfrog, just in case… you can get #18 by separate here.

Softdistortion, thank you man, it has been a lot of work not only for me and editors team.

In this regard, that’s what my article of Issue #19 it’s about. It’s a tutorial about the usage of an awesome incoming new tool: The first color management system that has been developed ever within a 3D commercial package. These tools have been developed by the brilliant Sebastian Goetsch to work within Lightwave 3D, and pretend to facilitate, make simple and accessible for ALL users the classic linear workflow by adding also color management capabilities within the 3D package. According to other specialists it was a kind of ‘impossible mission’ with the current SDK. So all my gratitude to Sebastian for developing so innovative tool.

Gerardo

#10

is the issue out on the newstands yet (On the east coast)? theres one Barnes And Noble in the area here that carries it and its like 20 miles away. heh

  • Will.

Will, You may want to go for a walk to B&N in a week :slight_smile:

Just to comment I’ve seen some people confusing FP pipelines with linear workflows. Please, be aware, they are not the same thing: Working with FP images doesn’t mean we are implementing a linear workflow automatically. Processes similar to LightWave’s “Full Precision” Renderer and You, by Kenneth Woodruff, Arnie Cachelin and Allen Hastings, are FP pipelines. Notice they don’t pretend to be linear workflows, but rather a very useful introduction to the advantages of FP renderers and FP processings.

Consider also that varing the gamma at the end of the output render without any pre-processing, doesn’t mean we are gamma correcting colors. Because we are not correcting colors gamma in fact, but the opposite.

In those specific cases, flat colors, colors from procedural textures, 8-bit images, lights, etc are already in log space (this means they are already gamma-encoded). Though the diffuse shading obtained is linear, colors are not linear; so when a simple gamma exponent is applied in post-processing (in LW, PS or any compositing package), what we are really doing is cranking gamma up for those colors. this means, we are adding gamma twice! So colors we obtain are wrong. That’s the reason why we get wash out images when we apply a gamma exponnent near to 2 without a proper correction. That’s one of the reasons also why is not easy to match properly a CG element with a BG plate even if we have adquired the lighting intensities in location through an HDR image.

The gamma exponent is not arbitrary as well. If we are applying a linear workflow, we’d want this exponent can be as accurate as possible due to two main reasons: Proper Linearization and previewing. Later, in post, we can vary the final gamma for artistic purposes. But be aware: some type of linearization (at least a basic one) is a must in any linear workflow.

There are other misunderstandings in this topic, which is what this article in Issue#18 tries to clarify as well.

Gerardo

#11

Althought I’m quite used to work with FP pipelines I think it may be a good read, gonna check how much is the shipping costs to Spain :wink:

#12

WOW! I didnt see this one comming. Will it be a commercial plugin?
This made me just order a subscription :slight_smile:

Keep up the good work, Florian

#13

Hope you find it useful, Pablo :slight_smile:

Gerardo

#14

Florian, you are the first person who notices and understands the importance of what is happening here.

You may imagine my surprise when I saw my render preview, worked for ProPhoto RGB color space, output according to FujiFilm REALA 500D Printing Density and previewed as a Kodak 2383 Theater! all this within Lightwave!!! just impressive.

These are great news for CG studios mainly (and some advanced CG professionals), since there’s a lot of more things we can do with this color management system. But not only that; the other great news is: Thanks to Sebastian’s generosity, the advanced SG_CCTools will be for free (personal or commercial projects) for all Lightwave users.

Thanks for your comments,

Gerardo

#15

So I guess I’ll have to order #19 too :wink:

That’s really great news :smiley:

#16

where do we buy these plugins?

yours pal :bounce:

#17

Pål, these FREE tools are ready to be released by Sebastian Goetsch very soon.

Just to explain a bit other advantage about the new SG_CCTools: In article on Issue #18 I share 3 Linear workflows:

  1. Classic Linear Workflow
  2. Inverse Linear Workflow
  3. Multipass Linear Workflow

Each one offers different advantages according to each project and the way we feel comfortable to work. Classic linear workflow offers extreme accuracy, but LW tools available (before the SG_CCTools) weren’t enough to cover each case of linearization easily. The new SG_CCTools facilitate a lot this workflow and makes it almost intuitive. But other good thing about the SG_CCTools is that its color management capabilities work smoothly with any of the workflows proposed. So if we want to apply the Inverse Linear worflow to work with legacy projects, we can add also these color management capabilities to that project. Or if we want to apply the Multipass Linear workflow to work as always we’ve worked, but switching ON its linearization system to work in linear light automatically, we can add color management facilities to this workflow too. Still more, even if you don’t work with a linear workflow, you can take advantage of color management capabilities of the SG_CCTools. In such cases you might want to apply same principles of the general color management workflow that I proposed in that article too.

Gerardo

#18

Sounds very cool… I’ll be looking for those issues of HDRI at B&N next time I’m there. We actually reviewed linear workflows at the last user group meeting in NYC. It was the first I heard of it but seemed very useful especially for studios and architectural vis people too.

#19

Yep. Very useful for any digital processed image or CG work.

Gerardo

#20

Just to let you know that 2 of these 3 linear workflows are viable without no commercial tool thanks to genius and generosity of Denis Pontonnier. Very special thanks to him for developing and sharing and improving constantly his experimental nodes, they really should be taken on as a built-in system for Lightwave 3D.

Gerardo

#21

How did I missed this???
I just placed my order for the mag. Is this also pass setup using nodes? As you have mention a multipass linear workflow.

Can’t wait for the mag to arrive now.

Cheers and keep up with good stuff!

#22

Thanks Akademus!

Yes, I’m proposing a simple implementation for one of these workflows that makes use of it (Multipass Linear workflow). The good thing about this generic implementation is that we can work as always, switch ON the linear system and WHOA! linear workflow automatically! With some adjustments to the nodal network, we can make this work as Color Mapping options in VRay. Disadvantage is that, like VRay, this linear workflow is not accurate since it doesn’t take into account colors from illumination (unless we use an AO solution only). But if LW implements a built-in node editor system for multipass or render buffers, we could have an automatic and accurate linear workflow system better than Vray.

Gerardo

#23

Just to let you know Sebastian Goetsch has already released the SG_CCTools. For more info, please visit this thread:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=5&t=617417

Gerardo