ACES set up for Blender using OCIO

Discussions - Using ACES VFX
17

Hi,

today I updated the Blender & ACES page on my site. I re-rendered some images with Blender 2.93 and ACES 1.2. I guess another update for ACES 1.3 will follow soon. 1.4. Blender & ACES 1.2 – Brylka – TooDee – PanicPost

Here again the main steps:

Setup Blender 2.93 to work with ACES 1.2 using OpenColorIO (OCIO)

Blender / ACES and color checkers.

Blender 2.9.3 Cycles rendering in ACEScg (View Transform Rec.709). The objects have all the diffuse material color values of the 18 colored patches of the color checker. The scene is only lit by one HDRI and the comp is a simple A over B.

All the images are exposure balanced to read RGB 128/128/128 in sRGB with the MAC tool “Digital Color Meter” for the middle grey patch on the color checkers.

Some years ago I could not find a simple step by step setup to use Blender with ACES & OCIO on Mac and Windows. At the end here I figured it out and noted the steps down for others to find:

  • Download the OpenColoIO config for ACES 1.2 (Release Candidate) from this link:
  • github.com/colour-science/OpenColorIO-Configs/tree/feature/aces-1.2-config
  • Unzip and place the config in your user folder or on a server location.
  • Set a system variable for OCIO to this path. This allows to use it with all applications that supports it and don’t have an option in the preferences to set the path manually.
  • Alternatively you can start Blender with the OCIO variable set only for one application.
  • On MacOS I use Automator to create an App called “Blender_ACES”. In this app I use a shell script to set the variable and start Blender.
  • For Windows I use a simple .bat file.
  • I did not find an easier way to do it.
  • Happy Blending…
  • Oh, the latest 2014 color chart you can find here:
  • github.com/colour-science/colour-nuke/tree/master/colour_nuke/resources/images/ColorChecker2014
MAC “Automator” script and PC “.bat file”

Automator MACOS:
export OCIO=/Users/daniel/MEDIA/ACES/OpenColorIO-Configs-feature-aces-1.2-config/aces_1.2/config.ocio

cd /Applications/Blender/blender.app/Contents/MacOS/

./blender

PC .bat file:
Set OCIO=D:\ColorManagement\ocio\aces_1.2\config.ocio

START “Blender 2.9.3” “C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\blender.exe”
Best

Daniel

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