Hi everyboody,

I'm trying to render some simple geometry with textures exported from Substance Designer. As you can see from the attached screenshots, what I see in Houdini's viewport and even in Window's file explorer is reasonably close to what I see in Designer's viewport: the colors of the jerrycan and all the other objects are pretty vibrant.

When I go to render in Houdini however (RenderView also in the screenshot) the colors are unexpectedly paler. Why?

I'm currently working in Designer with the "Legacy" color management setting and the exported baseColor texture are PNGs in sRGB color space. In Houdini the RenderView has the "LUT and Gamma" setting with default values.





Kind regards,

Manu

Bumping this topic one time... is there perhaps a better area of the forum to ask in?

I found the problem: The BaseColor texture by default is baked by Substance Designer in sRGB colorspace. The PrincipledShader in Houdini needs a Linear texture. Designer can be set to bake out a linear texture. Alternatively, I imagine Houdini can linearize an sRGB texture and pipe the result into the PrincipledShader but I don't know how to do that yet. =P

I hope this helps somebody in the future.

Kind regards, Manu

manu3d
The PrincipledShader in Houdini needs a Linear texture. Designer can be set to bake out a linear texture. Alternatively, I imagine Houdini can linearize an sRGB texture and pipe the result into the PrincipledShader but I don't know how to do that yet. =P

The principled shader accepts either linear or srgb textures. Textures in srgb space are automatically linearized based on a heuristic. 8bit image formats are assumed to be srgb and everything else is assumed linear. To get more control over the handling of color spaces on textures, I recommend using an OCIO config, and then tagging the images with their color space using file name tokens. e.g. basecolor.srgb_texture.png, height.data.png, skydome.acescg.exr