Rendering Studio canvases at 8/16-bit?

SnowSultan

Does anyone happen to know if it's possible to force Beauty canvas passes to render just as a standard render would rather than a 32-bit EXR? The colors end up being different from how it looks in Iray render preview mode, and I'd use them a lot more if I could better predict how they would look when the render is complete.

I know that you can set a single canvas pass to be the 'active' render and that can be saved normally, but if you want multiple light passes or separated object passes, all the rest will be rendered in 32-bit. I also know that you can disable Tone Mapping entirely to get accurate results, but that makes lighting much more of a chore.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Sevrin

No, it's not possible.  The whole point of using canvases is so that you have a bigger spectrum to use in postwork, and have more options for tone mapping, LUTs, etc.  There are filters I use that don't work properly in 8-bit colour.

What you can do is run a render pass for each canvas and choose different canvases to be your active canvas.  The render window will show whichever canvas is active at the end of the render, and you can save those renders separately for compositing.  That would take a while if you have a lot of canvases obviously.  I don't recommend this.

I don't recommend turning tone mapping off for renders.  IIRC, when you turn it off, you disable Firefly filtering, but that may have changed.  I just turn crush blacks to zero and burn highlights to 1.  Some recommend turning gamma to 1, but I leave it at the default, so that I have an 8-bit reference.

SnowSultan

Thank you, was just wondering. Appreciate the explanation.

galien

SnowSultan said:

... The colors end up being different from how it looks in Iray render preview mode, and I'd use them a lot more if I could better predict how they would look when the render is complete.

 

The problem may be with the image processing software you are using.

I have three programs that can process the 32 bit files that Daz Studio produces.  With one of them (Affinity Photo) my experience is the same as you describe: it is virtually impossible to get the result to look the same as the non-canvas render.  With the other two (Blender and Franzis Emotion Projects) it's easy to get a result that matches.