Getting Started with ACES and OCIO

24 Dec 2020

Supplementary information on ACES and OCIO.

Links.

• Chris Brejon’s CG Cinematography Book: CG lighting and cinematography, has great section on ACES and OCIO, worth a read for all CG artists.
• colour-science’s OpenColorIO-Configs: Has the latest OCIO configs available.
• ACES Primer: The Academy’s getting started guides to ACES.
• OpenColorIO Documentation: Documentation of OCIO
• colour-science’s ColorChecker: Collection of MacBeth ColourCheckers as EXRs in different colourspaces.
• Cinematic Color: White paper from Jeremy Selan on colour pipelines used in Animation and VFX.
• Filmic Blender: OCIO config designed around use in Blender and Cycles, can be used elsewhere.
• Youtube: ACES in VFX – by Alex Fry – Siggraph 2015 (tech level: med): Alex Fry from Animal Logic discusses ACES usage on LEGO movies.

Windows for Linux.

See this video for How to enable WSL on Windows 10

To set up the OCIO environment variable under WSL, run the following commands. This assumes you haven’t set up .bash_profile already.

cd
echo export OCIO=/mnt/d/programs/ocio/OCIOConfigs/configs/aces_1.2/config.ocio > .bash_profile
source .bash_profile
env | grep OCIO

If you’ve already setup .bash_profile, then use nano to edit the file in the shell directly. Or you can use vim if you roll that way.

cd
nano .bash_profile

OpenColorIO.

To install the OCIOCHECK command run this (tested under Ubuntu 20.04) command. Note that this requires sudo access.

sudo apt install opencolorio-tools

You can then run the command using.

ociocheck

Batch Scripts for Windows

More info is provided on GitHub

• https://github.com/earlywill/scripts