Forum: Freestuff


Subject: Emulating a Hollywood Color Space in Poser 12 Renders for Greater Realism

Iuvenis_Scriptor opened this issue on May 25, 2022 ยท 2 posts


Iuvenis_Scriptor posted Wed, 25 May 2022 at 12:17 PM

This was a longstanding wish of mine, and as my Python coding skills have improved, I decided to try making it myself!  The Filmicizer scripts for Poser 12 shift colors in exported renders to simulate a more lifelike dynamic range than raw renders, even when exported in HDR or EXR format, can provide.  Specifically,  it emulates ACES, the standard color space in the film industry.  The standard for household devices and the render engines that are usually available on them is sRGB, an outdated model that often limits the realism of even the best rendersI first became aware of the problem when I happened upon this video, in which an experienced Blender user explained the issue in detail and recommended a plug-in developed by Troy Sobotka as the solution.  According to a note in the video description, later versions of Blender seem to have made it obsolete for Blender, but Poser retains the same limitation.


In short, the typical render engine's dynamic range is actually rather pitiful compared to that of the human eye or even a mediocre camera, which often hamstrings attempts at photo-realism. 


Someone on the now-defunct Smith Micro Poser forum raised the question of doing for Poser what Sobotka had done for Blender, and that's when the ever indispensable BagginsBill stepped in.  He designed a shader into which an already exported HDR render could be fed and re-rendered on a square plane prop placed against the camera to precisely fill its field of view.  The resulting image would have its colors shifted in the right way to emulate the effect of a Filmic Blender render.  In my experience, some fine detail was always inevitably lost.  It could be restored by applying a high pass filter to a JPG version of the original render and overlaying it over a tone-mapped 8-bit version of the re-render in Photoshop.  It was never the most convenient postwork process, but it worked, and the results were worth it!  At least, I thought so.

 

I'd long wondered if it could all be streamlined and perhaps even automated, to the point of rendering Photoshop completely irrelevant if I played my cards right.  So I took the color math BagginsBill did with shader nodes and implemented it in the form of a Python script!  In my tinkering, I stumbled upon a way to roughly imitate the effect on a JPG, but HDR remains the only recommended input format for true "filmicization."


Here are a couple of examples.


RAW RENDER:




FILMIC VERSION:



RAW RENDER:



FILMIC VERSION:



I'm not necessarily saying that my own raw renders are the best prior to filmicization, but if you like what you see here, just imagine what the same effect would look like on the work of a more skilled Poser artist!  If you're intrigued, please do check it out and let me know how it works for you!


hborre posted Wed, 25 May 2022 at 1:34 PM

Wonderful.  I will definitely check this out.  I have been tinkering with ways to modify shaders and lighting for a more realistic response to its environment.  I wouldn't call it realism but a real physical response, if there is such a description.  Thanks.  Looking forward to playing with it.