Filmic Blender – Software for realistic rendering in Blender

Repository

https://github.com/sobotka/filmic-blender

Introduction

Filmic Blender is software addition to Blender, that improves the rendering. Some call it the magic render button.

For those who don’t know Blender is free and open source 3D creation suite.
It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.

Blender is doing some of the things that are doing 3DS, Autodesk Maya and Cinema 4D. This software’s are very costly. They can cost a thousand of dollars per year for using one licence.

The official statement about Filmic Blender is:

This OpenColorIO configuration adds a closer-to-photorealistic view transform for the renders. For imagers working with non-photorealistic rendering. It also will bring significant dynamic range and lighting capabilities, as well as potentially open up correct transforms for rendering to HDR displays and other such forward looking technology. It is as close to a Magic Button you can get for an experienced imager.

Filmic Blender is created by Troy Sobotka. Many thanks to him.

In this post I will try to explain why Filmic Blender is needed, and how it works. Also, will show a few simple examples renders of mine.

scource

The problem

The problem is something called dynamic range and color transformation. Now I don’t want to get to technical, but I would explain some of the basic things about this thing. This is necessary to explain what Filmic Blender is doing and how important it is.

Dynamic range

The definition:

Dynamic range of a camera is the ratio of the brightest light ("whitest white") to the darkest shadows ("blackest black") in a shot. We express the dynamic range of a camera in stops, whereby each stop is a doubling of the light level

Dynamic range is the ability of the camera to catch the details in the lightest and the darkest part of the scene. This is especially important when there is a dark and bright object in the scene. Some believe that this is the most important parameter of the camera.

Blender is working in similar manure, catching light from the scene with his virtual camera.
The bigger the dynamic range the better. Here is illustration of it.

1 . Camera with a small dynamic range

Everything outside the range between the lines will be clipped. Meaning that it would be full black or full white.

2 . This is a camera with bigger dynamic range

My illustrations

Here there will be more details in the scene and it will be less clipping. Only the extreme bright and dark parts will be clipped, and details lost.

Below is a chart with the values of dynamic range of some of the cameras.

As we can see the eye has the biggest dynamic range around 20. Nothing surprising here. We cannot still produce a camera that will look the world as our eyes do. Second best are the cameras used for movie made Hollywood. This are the best cameras out there and have dynamic range around 15. Next are the dLSRs cameras with dynamic range around 12, and Blender only have 8.

This means that scenes with dark and bright objects will be heavily clipped by Blender.
Here is an example.

I have made a simple scene. A room with tight openings, and couple of objects inside. The sunlight is coming from outside.

As we can see, the room is almost dark, and objects are barely recognizable. This is not how the real-world lighting works. In the real world only one of this opening will be enough to full the room with light.

This is a real problem. Especially for renders in closed environment, like house. To compensate for this, a lot of users add hidden lights in the room. But this is not the real thing and the overall lightening is fake.
Here comes Filmic Blender to rescue.

Filmic Blender

Filmic Blender was released more than two years ago. Since than its usage is increasing, and it is adopted from the Blender community.

What Filmic Blender is doing is actually increases the value of Blender dynamic range. And by a lot. From 8 to 25! That is massive increase in value. It is even better than our eye.

My charts

As we can see from the chart, Filmic Blender is dominating. With this improvement it is better than the Hollywood studios cameras and better than our eyes. And all of this from an open source software created by Troy Sobotka. Many thanks to Troy.

Andrew Price aka Blender Guru has a really nice video on this topic. It will be of great help to check it. Here is the link.

How to install Filmic Blender

Filmic Blender Installation is very easy.

1. Go to GitHub and download the repository. Unzip the file. The name of the file is filmic-blender-master.
2. Go to Blender installation folder usually this is the location: C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.79\datafiles. If it is not just try to find the folder datafiles.
3. Copy and paste the filmic-blender-master file that you downloaded from GitHub.
4. Now in the folder datafiles there is already a folder named colormanagment. This is the folder that we want to replace. Rename this folder. I for example renamed in colormanagment-old. Next rename the filmic-blender-master folder in colormanagment
   The result should look something like this.

   

   5 . Restart Blender and you are ready to go.

   Note. This setup was needed until the release of Blender 2.79. Since Blender 2.79 was released in September 2017, Filmic Blender is integrated in Blender. If you use this version Filmic Blender is already there but it is still needed to choose it from the menu.

   

   
   

   To use Filmic Blender go to the scene tab of the properties panel, color management option, for render choose Filmic Log Encoding Base. Not a pretty name but it does the job. Here is a screenshot of the setup. And that is the basic setup.
   
   
   
   

   Now let’s render😊.

   This is the simple scene that I setup for testing. This is how it looks in object mode, without rendering.

   

   This is the first render, without using Filmic Blender.

   
   
   

   The render with Filmic Blender

   

   This is a low-quality render, for time saving, otherwise I would need to wait hours. But even from this low quality render the difference is more than evident. There is light in the room, and the objects can be seen. And this is how it is in the real world. Not like the render above. Maybe for someone this seems subtle, but it is a real game changer.

   What I have experienced using Filmic Blender, is that I need to undo some of my old habits, with fixing light. Now I must admit I’m not that advance user in Blender. And I work mainly on creating 3d models for game engines. Meaning that I don’t do a lot of rendering. But even for that little amount that I do, I fix the lighting all the time. Playing with it, creating multiple sources of light etc. Because light is essential to a scene. Light gives that final look.

   With Filmic Blender I need to make the adjustments more real. Not to make all that artificial lighting, but to play with the light as in the real world. And from what I have read, other users find this issue to. If I may call it an issue. They are used to tweaking the lighting, and now they must adopt to more real light. To adjust the intensity of the light, that mimic better real light - typically much higher than before.

   Resources

   • Troy Sobotka web
   • Blender web
   • Dynamic range explanation
   • Blender Guru YouTube video

   
   All the best.
   @dalz