Silverwing Quick Tip: ACES One Click Solution in Octane

This tut is made with Octane Version 2022.1_R4 and Cinema 4D Version 2023.1
Hello everyone.
Lets start this Year with a short one that might come in handy for everyone of you who wanted the ACES look and had problems baking it into an 8bit or 16bit output file like TIFF or PNG
P.s. leave a comment if you have any good Idea for a future quick tip / tut.
0:00 Intro
1:25 Showing the One Click Solution
2:00 Changes to the Workflow
3:11 Why I still use rec.709
3:57 Small Overview why to use ACES
5:32 Baking ACES into your Outpur
7:40 Rendering out a TIFF
8:41 Settings for exporting an ACES EXR
10:08 Rambling on about Fusion Studio

[@cowboytanaka6675]

du hast einfach cinema4d durchgespielt und macht jetzt side quests

[@SilverwingVFX]

He ha ha 😂 Sehr gut. Das pinne ich!

[@simontrickfilmer]

das Easteregg Chess hast aber ausgelassen beim durchspielen :-)

[@SilverwingVFX]

@@simontrickfilmer Richtig! Ich hatte es offen. Aber ich kann kein Schach... also hab ich es wieder zu gemacht...

[@JeromeLove]

Ummm, ABSOLUTELY! That would be super awesome to have a solid “quick tip” from you going into the Fusion ACES workflow. I feel like I have it down but comping subsurface and transmission based materials, things always look off. If you open to making a video showing C4D Octane to comp’d in Fusion, I would be as well as so many others making the switch, thankful! You really make the best videos on KZbin for C4D and Octane user! Maxon and OTOY should be paying you a commission for all that you do for them!!! 🙌🏾

[@SilverwingVFX]

Hey Jerome, thank you very much for your long comment! Thank you for your insight. I would sort of do my workflow with Fusion. When it comes to postwork I feel there are a lot of different workflows. So this might not be everyone's cup of tea how I do it. But I always like seeing what other people are doing so I can broaden my spectrum. About Passes and SSS: I usually don´t put together the beauty from e.g. Diffuse, Reflection, Refraction, SSS and so on. So I have no experience with comping SSS / Volume passes. What I do usually is comp light passes and then also do color correction if necessary for individual objects using cryptomatte or custom AOVs. Thank you very much for your kind words. Appreciate very much that you like my content ☺

[@SilverwingVFX]

@Zombies Eat Jerky Definitely Nuke. But its not the cheapest unfortunately. I know there are Indie options. I guess I am staying with AE and Fusion for the foreseeable future.

[@Willopo100]

seeing your fusion workflow would be excellent!

[@cesarpiette6448]

thank you so much for showing how to bake this shit into a simple psd or tiff lol ! I spent the last 6 hrs trying ti figure out what was going on... I was doing the render from C4D settings, not from aovs and I was upset my picture viewer was not matching the live viewer ! thank you !!

[@SilverwingVFX]

Thank you very much for your comment. Fantastic to hear you found it useful and actually brought you closer to finishing your project 🙌 The best of luck to you with rendering now 🤞

[@cesarpiette6448]

Sorry to come back but I ve noticed the resolution of the final files is at 72 dpi even if my render settings are at 300 dpi… Maybe I missed something ? how can I get a final psd render at 300 dpi with aov render ? Thank you 🙏🏻🙏🏻

[@SilverwingVFX]

​@@cesarpiette6448 Hey there, no problem at all. Yeah. Since you save out though Octane, the standard there is 72dpi. To change this, you can load the image into photoshop and then just change the DPI setting there. Go to "Image" "Image Size" Alt + Ctrl + I Then tick off "Resample" And then change the DPI to 300. The pixel - resolution of your image should already be correct if you have set the C4D setting accordingly. Cheers, Raphael

[@cesarpiette6448]

God thank you for your help and your fast reactivity !

[@klomotion]

Wie immer pures Gold! Vielen lieben Dank, dass du dein Know-How mit uns teilst!

[@SilverwingVFX]

Hi hi, vielen lieben Dank für Dein nettes Kommentar. Freut mich wirklich sehr, dass Dir mein Content gefällt ☺

[@vladolareanu]

One of the best Octane Quick Tip tutorial series on youtube. Thank you!

[@ForgingMind]

Thank you again for another clear and helpful tutorial!

[@SilverwingVFX]

And thank you very much for such a nice comment 🙌

[@bulba1561]

YES PLEASE DO FUSIONN TUT

[@SilverwingVFX]

Thank you for your input. Its amazing how many people want a tut about fusion 🙌

[@adamtubak]

Happy new Aces to you too! 🎉

[@SilverwingVFX]

😄😅 Happy new ACES to you too!

[@proceduralnodes3d]

Great tutorial!! I've watched numerous videos on Octane and didn't know about using the octane render group tab to set your render.

[@Clemyfourtwenty]

Tutorial on Standard Surface material! :D

[@bokasonic]

I’d love to watch that one too. Having not used Arnold at all I don’t really understand what I could use it for knowing all the different types of mats Octane has to offer.

[@christophott]

Cool that you did an update to your last tutorial! Thanks!

[@matistaa]

I‘d be interested in your comp workflow in fusion!

[@SilverwingVFX]

Thank you very much. I´ll take a note!

[@chronoxofficial]

Great tutorial, as always! I just want to quickly mention that if you render Lightpasses Aov's with these methods (both old and new), there is a small issue. If you comp those together to make a beauty pass in after effects, you will not have the same results as the main beauty pass from octane itself.. It will always be a bit darker. So you have to compensate that with some color correction on those lightpasses. If you want to get the same result, use the complete Aces workflow that Silverwing described in his other tutorial about Aces.

[@thorwaldhoffmann]

Great as always. I hope I find the time to test ACES asap. Thanks again for your work and great input.

[@bokasonic]

This one was ace! Thank you and Happy 2023!🎉

[@SilverwingVFX]

Glad you like it. Thank you very much and Happy 2023 to you too!

[@amisheetrit2119]

Thank you Rapahel!!!

[@SilverwingVFX]

Thank you very much 🙌🙏

[@edry]

Damn!! I was JUST looking for this, thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[@SilverwingVFX]

Ha, super nice. You very welcome!

[@mikebdaniels]

thank you!

[@SilverwingVFX]

You are very welcome!

[@LuckyKOT]

Thank you, this is very helpful!

[@SilverwingVFX]

Thank you. Much appreciated!

[@BongbokCG]

👍🏻👍🏻🔥🔥🔥Thanks

[@SilverwingVFX]

Also thanks 🙌

[@yungbuttermilch]

Thank you for covering this topic and please continue to do so. I feel so lost, when it comes to color profiles and Gamma and all that.

[@SilverwingVFX]

Hey there. I really feel you. Its a very hard topic to grasp and not a lot of useful info is out there. What helped me is watching the "Max On Color" series from the Maxon Training KZbin channel. Especially those Bootcamp and ACES themed episodes: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eX6rg3SDpp6rmpo

[@yungbuttermilch]

@@SilverwingVFX Hab grad gesehen, dass du auch deutsch sprichst: Vielen Dank, Mann. Werde ich mir anschauen!

[@SilverwingVFX]

@@yungbuttermilch Cool cool! Man muss sich einfach einiges über das Thema anschauen, irgendwann beginnt man es zu verstehen 🙂

[@serialvision]

Great tutorial, tanks a lot

[@SilverwingVFX]

Thank you very much!

[@jasonwilde5335]

Great tut

[@SilverwingVFX]

Thank you very much Jason. Also thank you for becoming a Patreon. That´s super awesome 🙌

[@zotake]

Will be great a Fusion comp tutorial. I'm using AE and compositing with EXRs comes so hard... Thank you!

[@SilverwingVFX]

Thank you for your input! When I say EXRs in the this video, I am mainly speaking about multi layered EXRs. AE does surprisingly well with single layer DWAB compressed EXRs. At least with my workflow. But overall it feels like Fusion needs less RAM and is more efficient. I guess both have their place. But for non motion graphics realistic comps Fusion is great.

[@zotake]

@@SilverwingVFX Agree. I'm using multi layered EXRs, avoiding sequences. I never tryed the DWAB compress, I'll try it. Also nodal is great to work. Thank you again! 🥰

[@Mac_Daffy]

haha, happy new aces I like 🎉

[@hihihing7302]

Gooood!!!

[@SilverwingVFX]

Thank you 🙌

[@patricktaylor8637]

Awesome tutorial. Learning a lot from you. Unfortunately I still cannot get my images into Resolve looking exactly like they do in Octane. Very frustrating. Also, what is the image viewer you're using in this tut? I use DJV2, but it also show my images looking different than I see them in Octane. A double whammy! Keep up the great work!

[@SilverwingVFX]

Thank you very much for your comment. I unfortunately do not work with Resolve in that context. But usually what is needed is to let your host application know what color space your imported image (or image sequence) is (In your Case probably ACEScg). In Resolve there must be a function where you can assign a color profile to your footage. This you would need to set to ACEScg (assuming that ACEScg is the output setting for your renderings) In terms of look what you get out of Octane. It really comes down to how you save out your images. You can either save them out with the ACES tonemapping baked in. This is what happens if you use the tick workflow in the video and save to sRGB PNG / TIFF etc. Or you can save all the information in your output by saving EXRs with ACEScg set as output profile. In the first case, your images should look like in your picture viewer no matter where you watch them. In the 2nd EXR case you need to interpret your images in the host apps so they know that your image has a ACEScg color space. In the case of DJV2 viewer you would have to go through OCIO and set ACES to sRGB as the profile to get the right colors etc. To explain quickly. What happens in Octane in your live viewer as well as in other programs when you look at ACES footage, the color space is converted from the wide ACEScg gamut to sRGB. Usually this is done by using the ACES to sRGB color mapping. Basically what makes your image look nice, avoids blown out highlights and over saturated colors. Because otherwise the colors would look wrong on your screen, because your screen is setup to display sRGB. So in viewers like the DJI or in software packages like After Effects or Davinci you have to let the them know that the input image is in an ACEScg color space and you want to look at it through a Aces to sRGB tonemapping. Hopefully that was somewhat understandable and helps you to get there with your ACES pipeline. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask! P.s. I am not using any special viewer to view my images. What I usually do is look at them in the live viewer and then again in the comp program e.g. Fusion Studio. Cheers, Raphael

[@patricktaylor8637]

@@SilverwingVFX Dearest Mr. Wing - You Rock Dude! I feel like the clouds have parted and I can see the light, which is amazing because I received this response just after watching a total eclipse here in Austin where the clouds literally parted just in time for us to vote Totality! Thank you so much for your incredibly detailed explanation here. Things are making much more sense to me now. I am using the EXR method you describe above, and in your tutorials, and am doing things correctly on the Resolve side, but notice very slight issues in luma and saturation. Turns out there are some slight gamut concerns in ACES 1.2, specifically when importing ACEScg EXRs. I’ve switched to 1.3, which presents some more options in Resolve, and am good to go, for the most part. That said, your idea to simply bake the ACES tone mapping into the sequences via PNG or TIF I think is the best solution for this particular personal project. So, thanks for that! And I’d also like to thank you for a little tidbit of advice you dropped in one of your tutorials to use rec709 for the OCIO view look instead of sRGB. It takes the edge off my images quite nicely! Thanks again for taking the time with this amazing response. I, and I’m sure others, have learned a lot from it. And thanks for your incredible service to the CG Community. It’s much appreciated!

[@simontrickfilmer]

For comp: let's see what's left angles autograph brings. Looks good... Comes out later in juanuary

[@xthonik]

thanks for the tip, very informative as always :) i wonder about in-built OCIO config in C4D, the one that in project settings. Can that config affect somehow on octane's output and live viewer?

[@SilverwingVFX]

Hey and thanks for the input. I think you can force the ACEs color Profile on the render output. So you would see the right colors in the rendering. Since I mostly work in C4D R20 I have honestly not looked into C4Ds ACES integration too deeply. I should definitely do so soon! I am guessing setting all of C4D to ACES would not work with Octane right now, as the color inputs of Octane (mostly Lights, RGB Spectrum ect. Are still hard coded to take in sRGB values. Setting C4D to ACEs however makes all color fields use ACES colors. Take all of this with a grain of salt, as I have not really deeply looked into this. Maybe your question gives me an incentive to do so. Cheers and thanks for your comment and a great time to you!

[@jasonwilde5335]

The Force Tone Mapping tickbox. But first, this is another of your long list of outstanding and very informative tutorias. Your teaching style should be taught to others out here who are trying and failing to deliver quite complex technical info. But I do have a question. After following this tut I could not get the Aces look in my final Photoshop exr output. I tried rendering a couple of different files many times but no matter what I did the final exr matched the C4d Picture viewer and not the Octane live viewer. In the Octane live viewer the highlights of the polished metal object were controlled and had nice gradients while in both the C4d picture viewer and final exr Photoshop file the highlights were completely blown out to 255/255/255. I doggedly followed your instructions many times in the above tut but nothing worked so I then systematically rendered the files - first with no ‘boxes’ ticked in the octane render settings then with each subsequent render I ticked one box. I finally got the photoshop exr image to match the octane live viewer image when I ticked the Force Tone Mapping box (along with false colour for cryptomatte, show passes and save beauty boxes - and the other settings EXR(Octane) / 16 BitChannel / DWAB / Float 32 Bit buffer / Acescg Colour space). Now, with those boxes ticked and settings applied, not only does my final exr image match the Octane live viewer but so does the image in the cC4d picture viewer. So the question(s) is “is it ok to use the Force tone mapping tick box or should it be avoided?” I have no idea what's going on under the hood.

[@SilverwingVFX]

Hey Jason, thank you for your long comment and explaining your workflow nicely so I have a good picture of what you are doing. Color is a very complicated topic and it´s not as easy to explain in a couple of sentences. So I will try my best to get you the info you need: There are two workflows here: Workflow 1: that I am suggesting: Work though the ACES sRGB one klick tone mapping live viewer setting. That means in the background Octane is handling everything in a wider ACES color space and distills down the image to what our screens can handle, which mostly is sRGB. When exporting, take this large color space and save it with all its infos (This then looks wrong in your Picture Viewer and e.g. Photoshop) because it is the wide gamut of ACES you are seeing unfiltered through your sRGB screen. Then in your image manipulating app, use a OCIO filter to again funnel that huge color space into a usable sRGB image. This way you have a wide range of colors at hand that all behave naturally when mixed. For a better understanding you might want to watch my other ACES related content on my channel. Workflow 2: The one you currently discovered and using. It starts out the same. You work though the ACES sRGB one klick tone mapping live viewer setting. But instead of opting for saving an image with the wider color space, you opt to save the funneled (reduced) sRGB version. It´s more easy to handle as what you see is what you get. But if doing compositing with it. e.g. adding light passes etc. The math will be wrong and mixing lights will look different then in reality (or in your live viewer) Also you are loosing all your above white capability. For example I use that after the fact to get realistic glows and lens effects. If you do not do such fancy things, then that workflow is totally fine. People use that all the time because it´s more convenient and in a fast moving environment has less points to fail and is generally faster to work with. So short answer: Its OK to work with the Force Tonemapping method. You are leaving a couple of things on the table with that. The highest quality you get when you carry the ACES color space over to your comp app, do all your color correction in ACES and as a last step convert it to your desired space. e.g. sRGB. So, long question, long answer. I really hope that you can see through the convolution a bit and begin to understand what I am trying to say 😇 Cheers and a great Day to you, Raphael

[@jasonwilde5335]

​@@SilverwingVFXHey Mr Silverwing. Thank you very for much taking the time to write the above reply. I thought the force tone mapping was too good to be true. I am following your steps laid out in your videos and using the OCIO filter in photoshop but I cant get Aces to work as per your workflow 1 and videos. Its not a major issue at this moment in time as Im not producing work for clients and am still in my 'learning' phase of becoming a 3d god, I'm an apprentice god 😇So its back to the drawing board for me 🤓 Meanwhile I will contact Otoys help 'desk' to make sure all is well with the app just to make sure. I have been over the workflow steps/videos so many times now that Im thinking that there may be something wrong - but I'd also bet a large sum of many that Im doing something silly to sabotage myself. Thanks again. Onwards and upwards.......

[@koushamotamedi6012]

thanks man for your tuts, I use the old method with compositing everything in AE and I just have some problems when I'm trying to use AOVs with aces, specially my Z depth pass is always wrong even after i do the conversion in AE. Do u have any recommendation for that?

[@SilverwingVFX]

Hey and thank you so much for your comment. To answer your question: I actually very rarely use Z-Depth so so I would have to look into it to be sure what´s happening 😇 Could you elaborate what you mean by "Z-Depth is always wrong" what are you using the Z-Depth for and what are your expectations? Thank you and cheers 😊

[@edrevvvv]

I get a message that says there is no file name specified for that image. Want to continue without saving? ( this if i dont use the save button from c4d, and not octane one )

[@SilverwingVFX]

Hi there and thank you for our comment. This is correct since C4D does not know about the saving abilities of its plugins. So if you set everything up correctly in the Octane output dialog, despite the warning of C4D, your file will be saved. Edit: I recommend you testing the saving capabilities on every scene with a short low sample render for example. So you can make sure everything has been set up correctly and the file ends up where you want it to be and in the format / color space you want it to be.

[@druckit]

Do you also need to check ACES tone mapping on the Octane camera tag>Camera Imager?

[@SilverwingVFX]

Hey there and thank you for your comment. If you don´t have the camera imager active, the main render setting is handling all cameras. If you have the camera imager turned on, your individual camera overrides the global setting. In this case, yes, you would need to also enable ACES tonemapping in the individual Camera Imager 🙌

[@druckit]

@@SilverwingVFX Thanks so much!! I always wondered why the Camera Imager existed under settings too, that makes sense 🙌

[@ignaciosagrario]

Hi! I'm very interested about your EXR DWAB compression choice. You said you already choose it in your tutorials, do you have any in depth video about that? Thanks!

[@SilverwingVFX]

Hey there and thank you for your comment. Unfortunately there is no in depth tut about DWAB on my channel. Basically its just one of many different compressions of the EXR standards. It should also just work. The only thing that might be interesting is that its lossy compressed, but I never noticed any artifacts even with heavy grading. If you you have any specific question, I am happy to answer!

[@ignaciosagrario]

@@SilverwingVFX I was just curious about it because there is no much info about compression and I just tend to use "Rle" by default. However, I will start testing DWAB if it works fine. Thank you!

[@Mash4D]

The thing I keep seeing with "use aces!, its amazing!" Is that you can fade out saturated bright colours to white and clamp down on blown highlights. But, there any significant difference between this and just using the "saturate to white" and "highlight compression" sliders already present in octane?

[@SilverwingVFX]

Hey Matthew, that´s a really good question. Aces sRGB and rec.709 tone mapping tries to emulate the colors and look of how we perceive the world. Also very similar of how analog film looked. There is more at work then just desaturating highlights and having a soft shoulder. Granted, Octane through its spectral nature is a bit of a special case in that it always had a huge color gamut internally. Still ACEs is doing some color transforms to the image that are more natural and more in line to how we see them. Last but not least there is the pipeline aspect. Aces allows you to render out large gamut files and then take all the colors and post process them in AE, Fusion, Nuke. Before baking them down to the usual sRGB / rec.709 color space. Taking advantage of the huge color gamut was not really possible before aces because all that Octane could save was sRGB. Being able to manage colors and export larger gamuts makes it possible to render for other workflows e.g. Cinema where they work with DCI P3 or rec.2020 HDR productions like for Netflix / Disney+ / Amazon. There are a lot of other things that I could talk about. But that would make my comment to long. One thing to note though ACES is not the be all and end all. Its is in ongoing development and continuedly is improved upon. If you have your workflow with highlight compression and saturate to white then keep on using that. ACES is just another workflow. With the benefit that its standardized so it can be implemented cross platform.

[@ThomvanVliet]

Hey question, when I save my output as a TIFF it all works perfectly, but the moment I try to output it as an EXR (16bit) it comes out overbright and washed out. I've tried all kinds of different setups, baking tonemapping etc. But EXR seems to mess my file up while TIFF works as you show here, is this normal?

[@SilverwingVFX]

Hey there. Saving EXRs does not tonemap the ACES like it would by using TIFF. With 32bit data octane expects you to continue the workflow you chose in post / comp. If you set your output to Linear sRGB then Octane will use that workflow, if you set it to ACES or ACEScg,in the main tab of the Octane render settings. It will use this workflow. C4Ds picture viewer does not show you the right colors when exporting an ACES EXRs it will look off color and too bright. Once you continue your aces workflow in Comp, it looks right again. You might have seen it I have also a tut on the After Effects part of the workflow.

[@ThomvanVliet]

@@SilverwingVFX Yeah I thought so, thanks for the in depth reply. Especially with color spaces its really easy to get lost in all the different viewers, ocio files, post-software color spaces and rendering tonemapping options. There's like 24 different ways to get it wrong.

[@ThomvanVliet]

@@SilverwingVFX By the way, the workaround we have in the studio now is by NOT saving the beauty file through octanerender itself but via cinema, and setting that to OpenEXR 16bitfloat, then setting the octane color setting to: HDR: linear SRGB, with bake tonemapping ON. This way we still get the nice cryptomatte option from EXRs without going through all of the color space hoops

[@SilverwingVFX]

​@@ThomvanVliet That´s great. Just bent the tools to the way you want to use them!

[@thomascollier7754]

Fusion please!

[@SilverwingVFX]

Noted 🙌

[@bulba1561]

thank you!

[@SilverwingVFX]

And thank you very much for watching my content!

[@bulba1561]

@@SilverwingVFX no problem brother, keep up the good work!