OCIO CG Config for ACES

The OCIO Computer Graphics (CG) config for ACES is a simple, lightweight config intended for use in typical digital content creation (DCC) apps that need robust choices for texture and rendering spaces and a basic selection of display and view transforms.

Users who need a more extensive set of color spaces, including digital cinema camera color spaces and a wider set of displays and view should look at the OCIO Studio Config for ACES.

Please note that some of the color spaces (e.g. for texturing) are not officially part of the ACES specifications but are included because they are widely used in VFX, animation, and games.

The latest version of this config may be downloaded from the Releases page of its GitHub repo.

The CG Config leverages the high quality ACES implementation built into OCIO itself and so requires no external LUT files. In fact, even the config file is built into OCIO and users may access it from any application that uses OCIO 2.2 or higher by using one of the following strings in place of the config path:

ocio://studio-config-v2.1.0_aces-v1.3_ocio-v2.3 (for OCIO 2.3 or higher)

ocio://studio-config-v1.0.0_aces-v1.3_ocio-v2.1 (for OCIO 2.2 or higher)

These new configs adopt an advanced naming convention so that they can be uniquely identified:

studio-config-v1.0.0_aces-v1.3_ocio-v2.1.ocio

|-----|-------------|---------|---------|---|

|Type | Colorspaces | ACES    | Profile |   |

Where:

  • Type: The type of the config, e.g., CG or Studio

  • Colorspaces: The version for the color spaces and other config features

  • ACES: The aces-dev version being used

  • Profile: Minimum required OCIO version

The OCIO Configs Working Group collected input from the community and simplified the naming scheme relative to the earlier OCIO v1 ACES configs. However, aliases have been added so that the original color space names continue to work (if there is an equivalent space in the new config).

Please note that with OCIO v2 we are trying to be more rigorous about what constitutes a “color space”. For this reason, the new configs do not bake view transforms or looks into the display color spaces. Therefore, it is necessary to use a DisplayViewTransform rather than a ColorSpaceTransform if you want to bake in an ACES Output Transform. This is not only more rigorous from a color management point of view, it also helps clarify to end-users the important role of a view transform in the process. Baking in a view transform is a fundamentally different process than just converting between color space encodings, and it should be perceived as such by users.