I've mainly focused on improving things in the editor today. Hello, customizable keybindings!

Besides that, I couldn't resist touching the post pipeline again, adding support for CDL (ASC Color Decision List) transforms.

A straightforward transformation in the form of

pow(slope_rgb * color_rgb + offset_rgb, power_rgb)

with optional saturation.

I want to leave the "heavy" grading part to external tools like Resolve, but it's a quick and easy way to get a specific *look* into the pipeline.

Initially just intended as a test for the Lua scripting interface, but the tree generator by Nick

https://nickmcd.me/2020/10/19/transport-oriented-growth-and-procedural-trees/

can be quickly implemented *and* is fun to play around with. 🌲

It's also hackable, allowing extensions like, e.g., global constraints based on the surroundings.

After the experiments of the last days, I had to integrate AgX by @troy_s.

Very eye-pleasing results and excellent control when color grading in Resolve. Here's a comparison between AgX (Base) and in combination with an aggressive color grading LUT authored in Resolve.

@h3r2tic @troy_s Here is the first transfer function I came up with based on XLog (https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1NwjaD0NzNMzQeNQqZECj33PdcYGkeBM4#scrollTo=gSA0nfc974mp):

https://gist.github.com/begla/00c39241b529dd7b3969be96aa354abd

I took the default values of XLog with w_0 set to 200 and p_0 shifted to avoid negative values (see computeNonNegativeFit) - keeping the linear toe.

I did some quick tests with Tony vs. the reference images and my testing scenarios, and they turned out to be very promising, given my rather heavy usage of small LUTs. Grading also seems to respond well. 😃

@LxLasso @camkerr Yey, another tone-mapper variation! 😁

As far as I can tell, the ACES 1.3 gamut compression works well, keeping the ACES look without introducing another look on top of it, like the "blue artifact fix transform" does. It only touches the problematic colors without increasing the brightness of the purple spheres and the portal in the background (and the whole image, honestly).

For further reference, the input transform can be found here:

https://github.com/ampas/aces-dev/blob/d3d4df5f0095dfa663bee768ff57c8b9135ebb05/transforms/ctl/lmt/LMT.Academy.ReferenceGamutCompress.ctl

If you happen to build your tone mapping from the ACES reference implementation, I can not recommend applying the "Blue Light Artifact Fix" LMT highly enough. For emissive objects, pure blue otherwise almost directly clips into the purple areas of the gamut:

https://github.com/ampas/aces-dev/blob/dev/transforms/ctl/lmt/LMT.Academy.BlueLightArtifactFix.ctl

The fix is a simple matrix transformation applied before the RRT in the AP0 color space.

Some more fun 😀 details in the ACES community:

https://community.acescentral.com/t/colour-artefacts-or-breakup-using-aces/520/8

Here's a short video showing ray-traced shadows applied to local light sources in the volumetric fog system.