It seems that there is a serious color difference in the orange color?

Graphics
#1

I’m a newbie. I’m not an expert in this area, but when I want to color my material, I always get a lighter render than I expected - especially orange:

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I’ve seen some comments about setting the color space to linear, but I don’t see any setting for that in the engine,. What settings should I adjust?

#2

More intuitive examples:

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#3

Maybe sRGB issue?

#4

OK, so after learning about color space, I think I’ve figured out the issue.

So here’s the bottom line: I think the issue is that under Lit Shading, the Material’s Color value seems to be directly used as a Linear Color value without conversion.

That means, even if you create a color constant node, pick a color (which is in sRGB), and plug it into the Material’s Color, the shader just treats it as a linear color and uses it directly in calculations. Then, when calculations are done, it converts the final result from linear back to sRGB for display — this causes the color to be incorrectly double-mapped into the sRGB space, which makes the output color appear washed out and lighter than it should be.

I tested this in Unreal Engine. I first connected the sRGB texture to the Base Color input (which expects sRGB) in the standard way, and it worked fine:

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Then, to reproduce the issue, I deliberately treated the sRGB color value as a linear value, and ran it through the sRGB conversion formula (so it’s “sRGB To sRGB” actually):

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As you can see, the output turned into this funny yellow color,

which is pretty much identical to the result I got in the Flax Engine:

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So, back in the Flax Engine, I applied the formula to convert the sRGB color to linear. Now, the output basically matches what I expected to see:

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There is one thing need to note: in the Unlit View, the rendering result looks correct and colors appear as expected:

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comparing:
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#5

Yes, I was just writing about my discovery :joy:

I think the sRGB option in the Import Settings is broken. I don’t see any difference whether it’s on or off.

#6

orange_texture2_text
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Here is the texture I used :grinning:

#7

Isn’t this just lighting setup?

Imported with sRGB and debug viewmode of Diffuse from GBuffer:

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Maybe it’s sth different…

#8

Yes, it looks fine in this view, but it looks different in Default Debug View, as you can see in the material thumbnail in your content:
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#9

Okay so I went over rendering pipeline with some debugging and there are couple of things:

  • default ACES tonemapping leaves colors washed out a little bit thus it should be countered with Color Grading (latest Flax Sample projects for upcoming 1.11 update have some tweaks to look even better),
  • Eye Adaptation can have significant effect on those colors too (somehow?),
  • there migh be some missing sRGB <-> Linear space conversion,
  • default lighting setup (esp. sun light) are a little bit yellow so they bump up this yellowish.

I haven’t found an immediate fix, since we’re just before 1.11 update I have to move to other things but I’m sure we will need to fix it at some point.

I don’t think the problem lays in texture data or material output but rather post-processing.

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