ACES Color Management Issues In Maya 2022

[christopherskokanic]

Hello everyone! I'll get straight to the point. When launching Maya 2022, everything seems fine. As soon as I open a scene, which was created in 2022, I get 2 errors and a warning. The first 2 errors state that "The view transform is invalid: ACES 1.0 SDR-video (sRGB)" and the other one says that "There is one missing color space used in the scene that is not defined in the selected transform collection. Affected color spaces will not be applied." One other note is that I cannot change the OCIO file location either, since it is grayed out.

I really hope someone can help me because I have no idea what is happening. I tried resetting my preferences to default and reinstalling Maya 2022, but none of those worked. I also went back to Maya 2020, which before did not have any issues with ACES and color management, but for some reason, it now has the same issue.

[ryan.harvey]

Thanks for letting us know. This hasn't happened with Maya 2022 default prefs (and the default OCIO config) on our side. Do you have any environment variable set at your user or system level? You might have environment variables for SYNCOLOR or OCIO set that could be making Maya look for color management settings in other places.

Another possibility is that preferences from other versions are conflicting: so you could rename all the 'Maya version' folders in C:\Users\<username>\Documents\maya and then launch 2022 again.

Let us know if either of those things are the cause?

Thanks,

Ryan

[christopherskokanic]

Thanks for the reply. I renamed the Maya version files, both individually and simultaneously, but I still get the same problem. The weird thing is how I only get the 3 messages once I open any Maya file, made either in 2022 or 2020. I haven't done anything to the environment variables that I know of, but how would I check those, both on a user and system level?

[Christoph_Schaedl]

Could you show us your colormanagement settings?

[christopherskokanic]

No problem: 

[ryan.harvey]

Thanks. Based on the screenshot it does look like the "OCIO" environment variable is already set somewhere.

There is a MEL command you can run in Maya: settingsSnapshot; 
If you run that in the same Maya session, it will produce a text file in your Maya folder. The file contains various things about your Maya settings including environment variables and values. It will include system paths and other things, so you may not want to attach it directly here, but you can private message me if needed.

If on Windows, I usually just click the start button and type "environment variables" and there should be a link to open your system level and user level environment variables.

Cheers,

Ryan

[christopherskokanic]

Thanks for helping. I'll send you that text file. I also checked my environment variables and they all seem okay, unless I'm missing something, which I would know nothing about, but there is a variable that I created to attempt to fix the problem a few days ago called OCIO, which I tried deleting but it just returns. It does point to the correct OCIO file though. I checked the path that the OCIO wants to go to in that text file and it's correct. ACES is there. The path is: OCIO=D:\Users\Chris\Downloads\3D Downloads\ACES\OpenColorIO-Configs-master\aces_1.0.3\config.ocio

[ryan.harvey · Accepted solution]

Thanks, this helps. 

The variable setting you have:

OCIO=D:\Users\Chris\Downloads\3D Downloads\ACES\OpenColorIO-Configs-master\aces_1.0.3\config.ocio

shows that you have a custom OCIO v 1.0 config file set. But by default, Maya 2022 includes OCIO v2 and an OCIO v2 config file in it's default install location here: C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2022\resources\OCIO-configs\Maya2022-default

So if the OCIO env var is not set anywhere by the user or system, Maya 2022 will load from that default install location and any scenes created in 2022 with its default color spaces will load without errors.

Maya 2022 also has a "legacy" config file meant for compatibility, so that scenes from older versions like 2020 still load and look the same. That config is in C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2022\resources\OCIO-configs\Maya-legacy

The fact that you get errors when opening a Maya 2022 scene makes sense if the OCIO env var is set and pointing to aces_1.0.3\config.ocio, because that config probably doesn't contain the expected color spaces.

Do you think you can unset the OCIO env var completely so that it uses the default installed config? i.e. when its fully unset, when you go into your main Preferences/Color Management, you should see this path (and it shouldn't be greyed out) :
<MAYA_RESOURCES>/OCIO-configs/Maya2022-default/config.ocio

I just want to double-check that when Maya 2022 is using its default OCIO v2 config, that opening a Maya 2022 does not produce color management errors by default. That's true in our testing at least.

Cheers,
Ryan

[christopherskokanic]

I was somehow able to delete that OCIO environment variable I created by changing its path to Maya's default config, then after, it allowed me to delete it. Now that section is no longer grayed out and I can set it to the path you specified. There's still one popup though, which I do not really know what it means. It says "There is one missing color space used in the scene that is not defined in the selected transform collection. Affected color spaces will not be applied." Again, thank you for helping. I hope this helps others who come across this.

I did found something a little weird though. When opening Maya, everything looks fine. Here's a screenshot:

But when opening my scene, I get that warning message I mentioned and the settings changed back to the old broken ones, with the 1.0.3 OCIO. I was able to simply change the path file and save the scene, but when opening it back up, the settings look fine but I still receive some warnings. They say this:

// Warning: file: C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2022/scripts/startup/colorManagementUtilities.mel line 262: Color space "Output - sRGB" in node ":file7" is not defined in the selected transform collection. //
// Warning: file: C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2022/scripts/startup/colorManagementUtilities.mel line 262: Color space "ACES - ACES2065-1" in node ":file9" is not defined in the selected transform collection. //
// Warning: file: C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2022/scripts/startup/colorManagementUtilities.mel line 262: Color space "ACES - ACES2065-1" in node ":file10" is not defined in the selected transform collection. //
// Warning: file: C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2022/scripts/startup/colorManagementUtilities.mel line 262: Color space "ACES - ACES2065-1" in node ":file11" is not defined in the selected transform collection. //
// Warning: file: C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2022/scripts/startup/colorManagementUtilities.mel line 262: Color space "ACES - ACES2065-1" in node ":file12" is not defined in the selected transform collection. //
// Warning: Color space 'Output - sRGB' could not be found. //

[christopherskokanic · Accepted solution]

Okay, I discovered why I was getting the warnings. Quite simple really, I should've known. My scene has some texture files set to the old and/or wrong color space. I simply set it to its correct color space and the scene is fine.

[ryan.harvey]

OK thanks for letting us know. Cheers!