New: Updated Color Picker

[Carlos_Carpintero]

The Color Picker in 3ds Max 2024 is now color managed!

Our goal for the Color Picker was to make it color managed with minimal changes in the code, how it looks and how it behaves. In 2023 and before, an 8-bit picker was displayed for RGB values, and floating point picker was displayed for the RGBA values. Now the same picker is launched in all cases.

The Color picker displays colors in 3 different color models:

• HWBt - Hue, Whiteness, Blackness: leftmost section with 2D gradient and vertical slider
• RGB(A) - top center sliders and spinners
• HSV - Hue, Saturation, Value: bottom center sliders and spinners

The Color Picker displays colors in 2 different color spaces"

• Scene-referred linear space (Rendering space)
• Display-referred space

Values are displayed in 3 different number formats

• unbounded floating point
• unsigned 8 bit integer (0..255)
• Hex web colors

Here are some details on the interplay of those:

• HWBt sliders and gradients are always in the scene-referred space. They don't have numerical representation in the UI.
• Left column of spinners are always in the scene-referred linear rendering space and always show the values in floating point. They can be outside of the 0.1 range.
• Right column of spinners are always in the display-referred (usually non-linear) space. So even in the gamma mode floating point 0.5 on the left won't give you 128 on the right. In OCIO modes you can select which display/view-transform is used for this column in the preferences ("Displays and Views" rollup "show advanced settings".)
• Middle section RGBA and HSV sliders and gradients are either in the scene-referred or in display-referred, in other words those sliders are connected to either the left column of spinners or the right column of spinners. The buttons on the top decides which and the text on the top will change accordingly. So if you prefer using those sliders in the perceptual scale, click the display button, gradients will look more uniform.
• Web Colors: those are always in the display-referred space, same numbers as the right column RGB spinners but in Hex, read only.
• Internally all the material/texture colors are stored in scene-referred space. We have added a system for tagging color parameters for their use case (UI colors, surface colors, light colors, non-color data etc) but currently most color swatches assume surface color. Some color parameters are not color managed so for those your mileage may vary in OCIO mode. Gamma mode should behave as before.