[Fixed] ACES tonemapping in viewport // request

[walter_sullivan]

Hey, I was wondering,

 

as 3D Coat already has an Unreal/Unity style shader in the viewport (which is amazing!), wouldn't it be really good to also have ACES Tone mapping in the viewport to even more closely match Unreal and Unity engine's in game looks?

 

I am currently texturing a lot in 3D Coat for my Unity game (it is a pure joy) and I notice that the ACES tone mapping in my scene makes the texture still look a bit different in game than in 3D Coats viewport. When turning off the tone mapping in engine, there is a very close match between 3D Coat's viewport and Unity's Viewport.

 

When turning on ACES tone mapping in engine, the texture is naturally a bit more saturated and contrasty. I use to texture at 100% contrast in Coat already to get a closer match, but it is not enough to mimic the ACES tone mapping.

 

I noticed that in the new Graph Editor, there is a post-processing option for the renderer, which offers ACES tone mapping already as a node. Seemingly, it only affects the render room right now.(?)

 

Would it be possible to integrate this into the Texturing Viewport as well? Maybe even in the Sculpt Room in case someone wants to texture their UE5 assets with vertex color. That would be truly amazing I think!

 

I know Substance Painter does not have this out of the box as well. You need a third-party plugin from gumroad for it. But at least it's there after you got it and works very well. So it is indeed possible to have ACES viewport in Substance Painter, even if it is not oficially integrated.

 

Marmoset does have it by default on their cameras since forever, so it is possible there to texture in ACES from the get go, out of the box, which is a huge advantage if your target Game Engines. I already worked this way there and it works super well to get a match to predict how it looks after exported into game engine.

 

I think this would be really a good feature to set 3D Coat apart, as it already has a game friendly shader as default. This would make it complete in terms of viewport rendering. I think it would be a neat feature that could be well advertised, especially to set itself apart from Substance Painter further in regards to being a texturing suite for games. ACES, or using at least some kind of tone mapping, is pretty standard in films and games.

 

And as it seems it is already there in form of nodes, I reckoned it might be approachable implementation wise without too much hassle. I would really love to see this feature now that I started to texture a lot in 3D coat.

 

Besides that, it looks ultra punchy and nice and would further enhance the viewport rendering as well, even if would just be for internal rendering and texturing alone.

 

Edited November 5, 2021 by walter_sullivan

[Henry Townshend]

Hello,

first of all my deepest sympathies and props to the developers for keeping up the development pace of 3D Coat! I hope you are all safe and sound. Your dedication and love put into the program is highly appreciated by your users.

I would like to ask if there is any news on this. An ACES viewport, like recently also added to Substance Painter, is something very useful in modern texturing tools. It helps to much better evaluate the final outcome in a game engine or renderer that uses ACES. A lot of game makers and film makers use ACES, it is a color standard. Currently there seems no way for the 3D Coat painting viewport to match ACES.

I saw that there is an ACES node already in the shader editor, so I assume some work on this is already done.Would it be possible to add ACES tone mapping to the texture painting viewport as well?  If it is possible to enable it for rendering, it should theortically also be possible to enable it during texturing, right?

It could be added as a dropdown just like in Substance Painter:

It would be a very useful if not crucial addition, as most other modern texturing tools have it now, namely Substance Painter and Marmoset Toolbag 4.

Its much harder to evaluate your textures for your target using ACES without this.

[Henry Townshend]

Any news or plans on this maybe ? I like to demonstrate what I mean by a direct comparison.

@Andrew Shpagin Here is the same model with the exact same textures and the exact same HDRI at the same rotation in both programs.

First comparison pic shows the regular sRGB viewport inside Substance Painter. Both Environment maps are set to the same brightness, as you can see by the highlights. Contrast is at zero in 3D Coat:

There is a good match to be observed. 3D Coat's viewport looks really high quality and crisp. In fact, I feel it has even higher quality in terms of surface details clarity (I am using the GGX , Burley UE4 view. Substance viewport quality is set to "Ultra 256pp").

Now, the same setup with ACES tonemapping enabled in Substance Painter:

You can see, this makes colors more punchy and general the image is more contrasted. This is how most game engines or cinematic renderers display their colors. ACES is the standard tonemapping used in Unreal, but also in Unity, and film. Not using it is an artistic choice, but in general, ACES is used to get a film like look.

However, texturing in 3D Coat makes it hard to predict the final result in terms of colors and contrast due to the lack of ACES tonemapping in the viewport. Previously, Substance Painter also did not have it, but users had an inofficial custom LUT to get an approximation. In recent versions, they implemented it themselves as a dropdown in the upper viewport.

Marmoset Toolbag 4, also a modern texturing app, that gets more and more powerful, also comes with ACES natively inside the program's camera settings.

You can try to mimic the ACES look a bit more in 3D Coat by increasing the contrast to about 70% and lower the brightness to about 80%, which gets it closer, but it is not quite the same, as colors are not affected, as they would be with true ACES applied:

I hope this maybe will be implemented. 3D Coat is a fantastic texturing software. But it makes a game art or movie workflow, where you need to predict results for use inside a game engine difficult without ACES tonemapping. It would help a lot and also make the tool more modern in that regard, especially now where more people will use 3D Coat very likely also to create content for Unreal Engine 5.

 

[Carlosan]

Hi

Please send any support-related questions, feature requests directly to Andrew at
andrewshpagin@gmail.com

Thanks

* Will be great to be able to assign color profiles loading LUT at user preferences:

 

//edit

3DCoat-2022-31 

Sat Jun 11 23:27:16 2022

- ACES tone mapping introduced (still experimental, need some feedback from users), look Edit->Preferences->View->Use ACES