I have been struggling with Arnold renders clipping badly – in order to get enough light I am having to increase light exposure and my highlights end up blown out.
I read a post about increasing the dynamic range in renders for Blender (https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/secret-ingredient-photorealism). This post mentioned the "Filmic Blender" colour configuration, which looks to be based on ACES. I assume this is the same path I need to follow for c4dtoa.
1. Base test
Here's a test render illustrating the issues I'm seeing, this uses the default 'color manager' settings:
2. Trying to setup ACES
I've tried to figure out how to get ACES working with c4dtoa – but I am failing. I have followed this post (https://cglines.blogspot.com/2020/05/how-to-aces-in-c4dtoa.html) loading, the ACES config:
but my output with these settings seems no better or different to the default test (am I missing a step after setting the ACES config?):
3. Using 'Blender Filmic'
I have tried loading the 'filmic' configuration, which was created for Blender, I assumed it would not work...and I couldn't really get it to do anything. However, I loaded the configuration and tried different selections and somehow got this result, which in terms of highlights and range is just what I'm after (although some textures are rendering incorrectly) – the problem is that I got this render to work, but I cannot replicate it, the config seems flaky and won't load and I cannot reliably replicate this output:
In short, is there something I am doing wrong in loading the colour manager config – it doesn't seem to be doing much, or it's flaky and I can't get the settings to stick.
Alternatively, am I barking up the wrong tree in trying to fix the dynamic range of my renders?
