LINEAR IMAGE OUTPUT (the easy way) [Rendering]

Last summer I worked at an advertising company called PETROL. They specialized in print work for video games. Almost every day I would render assets for the illustration department to paint over. They ALWAYS wanted their images to be linear, so they would have the maximum potential color and  value information to play with.

(if you arent sure what linear images are, there are some great breakdowns for linear workflow here. Basically linear workflow provides the maximum amount of RGB info, by showing a full spectrum of the color and value range, rather than "crushing" the blacks or the whites in the image.)

default diffuse pass

linearized

My supervisor showed me the quickest way to output linear images from maya for that purpose. There are other ways, but I found this way to be the easiest.

How to output a linear image from maya quickly and easily:

Once you have your lighting set up the way you want, and you have a final image in maya that you would like to output, there are 2 steps:

Step 1

In your rendering globals, under the "common" tab, check the box "enable color management"

Step 2

Open the attribute editor for the camera you are rendering with. In the "mental ray" tab, add a lens shader by clicking the checkered box next to "lens shader". I personally tend to handle image correction in post, so I use, "mia_exposure_simple", because it does everything I need, with no unnecessary attributes.

Ok, what did we just do?

We told maya to manage our color output linearly, and applied a standard gamma correction of 2.2 to the camera in order to compensate for the gamma correction maya does automatically. The image you produce will look much brighter, don't worry about that. The information for the dark image produced before gamma correction still exists. This new, brighter image has more color information and can be tweaked more dramatically in post than it could have previously.

Keep in mind that if there are textures in the scene, they will have to be gamma corrected individually. (More info here:  http://kakes3d.wordpress.com/2010/10/23/gamma-correction-for-physical-sun-and-sky/)