New Maya 2022 viewport displays textures very dark

[jmollot]

What's up with Maya 2022 and the new aces color space? I load a texture and the viewport display is very dark to the point of almost not being visible. The only way to fix it seems to be to change from Aces to Un-tone-mapped. Is this now what I have to do every time I make a new Maya project in order to be able to actually see my textures in the viewport? I'm not an expert on the color stuff. I'm running on a 2019 MacBook Pro, and previous versions of Maya's viewport have worked just fine until now.

[Christoph_Schaedl]

Yes if you need to see them untonemaped.

[jmollot]

Were previous viewports untone mapped by default? I guess I’m not understanding why the new default is to not be able to view the textures?

[Christoph_Schaedl]

Set the viewtransform to untonemaped in the colormanagement prefs. 

[Christoph_Schaedl]

https://youtu.be/FODVxXOIrvM

https://youtu.be/biGWwdqaimY

[jmollot]

Is untone mapped how it used to be? What would be the benefit of using Aces?

[Christoph_Schaedl]

You get more real looking renders.

https://youtu.be/RKW9Y1hMx1o

[jmollot]

Oh ok, I didn’t realize the viewport affected the render. So i should be converting all the textures to a different color space compatible with Aces if I want it to look better?

[Christoph_Schaedl]

Just use srgb in the file read node. Arnold does do the rest. Watch the video again.

[stephaniebellgardt]

Jmollot, if this helps, the best result I've gotten is changing the model to a temporary lambert texture instead of an Arnold one. That's the only way the playblasts come even close to being presentable for clients. I've tried several of the color transforms and with our studio's ACES config file, none of them are bright enough. It's a bit annoying to swap textures back and forth, but better than having a too-dark model. I've heard that 2024 is better about this, although I haven't checked it out.