I’m starting a new work with V-Ray 2.0 for Maya. I never worked before with this render engine, so first things first.
One of my first things is create a nice neutral light rig for testing shaders and textures. Setting up linear workflow is one of my priorities at this point.
Find below a quick way to set up this.
- Set up your gamma. In this case I’m using 2,2
- Click on “don’t affect colors” if you want to bake your gamma correction in to the final render. If you don’t click on it you’ll have to correct your gamma in post. No big deal.
- The linear workflow option is something created for Chaos Group to fix old VRay scenes which don’t use lwf. You shouldn’t use this at all.
- Click on affect swatches to see color pickers with the gamma applied.
- Once you are working with gamma applied, you need to correct your color textures. There are two different options to do it.
- First one: Add a gamma correction node to each color texture node. In this case I’, using gamma 2,2 what means that I need to use a ,0455 value on my gamma node.
- Second option: Instead of using gamma correction nodes for each color texture node, you can click on the texture node and add a V-Ray attribute to control this.
- By default all the texture nodes are being read as linear. Change your color textures to be read as sRGB.
- Click on view as sRGB on the V-Ray buffer, if not you’ll see your renders in the wrong color space.
- This is the difference between rendering with the option “don’t affect colors” enabled or disabled. As I said, no big deal.