Picture Viewer render missing gradients but Live Viewer ok

[orionds]

Octane Render C4D Plugin (and Studio) ver 2021.1.6 - (R4)

I tend to like the Live Viewer images better than the Picture Viewer renders. One reason is they seem to have more subtlety and better gradients. Gradients that appear consistently in the Live Viewer render do not appear in Picture Viewer renders. Picture Viewer renders them as flat colors. I exported both of these images as OpenEXR files. I confirmed that the "Live Viewer" image's washed out or gradient area is not a transparency. I really like this look in Live Viewer. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong to end up with this different result in the Picture Viewer?

I'm trying to use an ACEScg and OpenEXR workflow, but regardless of the selected color profile I get the same result in the Picture Viewer.

Thanks for reading. Any help at all is much appreciated!

[elsksa]

Hi,

ACES is unnecessaryand if fact, best to avoid.

Are the two screenshots the exact same frame?
Could it be due to the "Color" section in the Kernel settings? By default set to D65. For further information, this page covers it.

[orionds]

Elsksa, thanks for responding! In the past week I actually have been starting to read through your Octane Color Management pages - there's so much I don't understand yet! Thank you for making a really thorough resource. It has already steered me away from PNGs One problem that prevents me from applying your color profile advice (trying Filmic AgX, for example) is that in this current version of C4D Octane Plugin, there are no options in the OCIO dropdowns. I'm hoping that they fix that for the next version. I've never used Octane Standalone so maybe that would be something to explore to try OCIO profiles and looks.

I double checked that they are the exact same frame.

The "Color" section of the Kernel settings is set to D65.

I will read more on the links you provided. In the Kernel Color section I did have "Use Old Color Pipeline" checked on, so that might be part of the issue.

If you have any knowledge of getting OCIO profiles into the Octane C4D Plugin I would love to hear about it.

[boxfx]

Thats going to be very difficult to diagnose without a project file. We don't even know what we're looking at. Upload a cut down c4d file with needed textures and you'll have better luck with getting help.

[orionds]

Boxfx, thank you so much for responding. I had fixed the problem yesterday and had not updated this post yet. In the Octane Material Node editor for the leaf material's opacity channel I had placed a Gradient node and had put in a rather extreme gradient (black changing rapidly to white). The gradient worked fine for the Live Viewer but for the Picture Viewer I was getting this different opacity as shown in the images above. So the solution was to relax the gradient, tweaking the sliders to make it just a bit more gradual of a black to white transition. Now the Live Viewer is matching Picture viewer. They must just process Gradient node slightly differently. Either way, it was a small change that fixed it. Thank you again for your time considering my issue.