Linear Work Flow, diffuse, reflection and bump bitmaps

[CORRENTES]

Hi all...

 

Something crossed my mind today about linear work flow.

 

I have rendering in LWF. In my max gamma settings,i have the input bitmapsmaps to 2,2 so all my maps are gamma corrected.

 

But if this is true to the diffuse maps, what about bump and reflection bitmaps ?

 

Should i gamma correct all my bitmaps or only my diffuse/color bitmaps ?

[Stephen Thomas]

Hi all...

 

Something crossed my mind today about linear work flow.

 

I have rendering in LWF. In my max gamma settings,i have the input bitmapsmaps to 2,2 so all my maps are gamma corrected.

 

But if this is true to the diffuse maps, what about bump and reflection bitmaps ?

 

Should i gamma correct all my bitmaps or only my diffuse/color bitmaps ?

Well you are creating them in a 2.2 environment same as your diffuse map, so they need the same gamma correction applied in order to be handled correctly.

[Dave Buckley]

hmmm . . .

 

i have my input gamma set at 1. then everytime i use a bitmap in diffuse and reflection slots i place it inside a utility gamma and gain shader, but when i load bump or displacement i leave those at standard input.

 

haha i can't even remember why i do this. i read it somewhere. think it was on mrmaterials

[Dave Buckley]

sorry just noticed this was in the vray forum (not sure if the same applies)

[DavidR]

I think correcting maps other than diffuse is going a bit overboard. When I have to convert a scene to LWF, I set the Max preferences to gamma 2.2 for input, incl. maps, etc., so all maps are automatically corrected. The only 2 material things I have to adjust are solid colours and reflection strength; for colour, I copy the swatch, add a Vray colour map to diffuse slot, set type to 'specify' and paste the colour there -that way, you can always turn the map off to get you 'old' colour back. For reflection, you'll notice that your previous settings were way too reflective, and that the Vray colour map doesn't work so well here -I eyeball it, but it's usually around half or less of what it was.

[mfured20]

I had a strange workflow that I grew out of, where I basically applied a colorcorrect modifier to every single bitmap that I brought in. With that workflow, which I can now barely remember, if I didn't gamma adjust my reflection map especially it would look funny. It added a bit of room for fine adjustment in-program, too, so I wouldn't have to change the maps.

 

That being said, since I upgraded to Max2010, I have just been using the native bitmap importation gamma correction, and it has worked really well. I think this workflow, like my last one, is kinda unorthodox and cobbled together, but it works for me and gives me nice renders.