Shaders base color mismatch

[madrenderman]

Hello guys,
I'm going crazy with color management in Houdini, I set a base color in a Mantra shader using RGB values taken from an Arnold for Maya aiStandard shader. The result color is different, in Houdini it's not correct, it's not linearized. Has it to be linearized manually ? Just to understand if this is the normal workflow because all the other color settings are set to linear by default, only the base color seems to have this problem. 

Thank you

Ray

[Atom]

If you turn off the Color Correction for the material swatch it more closely matches your example image.

[madrenderman]

Yes I tried but doing so the color is correct only in the color picker, on the surface it is wrong because it's not linearized ... only way is to calculate the RGB values in linear space and insert them manually

 

[dimovfx]

This is the correct way for you to see the colors. Maya was very bad at linear workflow (at least before) and you have to compensate for that. Houdini is working correctly and if you want to look at linear colors you need to disable gamma where you need it. But after all, the final product should have gamma 2.2 because of how human eyes sees and how monitor works, and all the calculations behind the screen are (and should be) done linearly.

[madrenderman]

Now that I know I have to manually linearize the colors there is no problem, but it seems to me like a bug because everything else in Houdini in linearized by default, textures for example, if they are 8bit they are linearized. 

If I take RGB values in Photoshop of the red color I posted yesterday, and put them in Maya (Arnold), the result is the red color of Photoshop. But if I do it in Houdini the result is an orange, both on the color picker and the surface, until I use a pow function to correct it. This doesn't happen with textures ...

Anyway no problem, now that I know everything is ok

 

 

[dimovfx]

Well you have to take account for how images are stored. Most of the 8-bit images are gamma corrected, but 16 and 32 bit images are linear. So it depends how the program reads the file and removes the gamma or you have to do it manually. So if you write linear image in Photoshop and read it as linear in Maya/Houdini, its all good. But if you write gamma corrected image and read it as linear in Maya/Houdini, then you have a problem. You need to be aware of colorspace if you want to have correct color output