Máté Dömötör

Hello Houdini Community,

I am setting up Tech Tests for the student project we are running at university. We are studying Film VFX so our pipeline mainly consist of tools used in that pipeline. Maya for modelling and animation, Mari for texturing, Nuke for compositing, Houdini for simulations and Solaris for lookdev and rendering.
Since we had trouble with color spaces in the past, I made a clean scene just for this purpose. It has a card, with an unlit material (only emission enabled) and the color checker from Nuke used as the texture.

My export from Nuke:
- sRGB color space PNG
- linear/raw EXR

When I import these images back to Nuke, they match color nearly perfectly (minimal clamping due to sRGB).

I made two setup for the material, one using the PNG with color space set to sRGB and the one with the EXR using raw as color space.

When I'm using PNG as the texture and in my karmarendersettings I am exporting the rendered frame as PNG it matches up in Nuke. Same applies for using EXR texture and rendering out an EXR (set to Raw in export).

The issue comes when I am saving my render as EXR and I am using the PNG material. Also reversed, so EXR texture and exporting to PNG. From my understanding setting the input color space properly is there to make sure colors are correct so I am not sure why my exports differ.

PNG texture (sRGB) - Render saved as EXR (Raw)


EXR texture (Raw) - Render saved as PNG (sRGB)


If my setup would be correct/would work correctly the two images look identical with colors. This is what I am looking for help with.

Renders:





If I can help with some other information for the project or settings I did not send, please don't hesitate to reach out.
Thank you for your guidance in advance!

Máté Dömötör

Checked Marta Feriani's work and I've found it astounding. It is not the approach I'm thinking of, but still a very nice thing to learn about.

The lightning branching seems to be a quite nice solution for creating the splits in the branches, I might use few ideas from it in the future.

That reference image is awesome, helps me a lot with understanding the patterns of leaf size and rotation.

Thank you for your advice!