OCIO Color Management

OpenColorIO is the now default mode for color management in new scenes. This makes it easier than ever to implement a modern color pipeline.

In addition to the changes introduced in previous versions, 3ds Max 2025 includes the following improvements:

• The VertexPaint tool is fully color-managed.
• The new Color Space Conversion process operator can be applied to Data Channel modifiers to convert color data (such as vertex colors) from one rendering space to another.
• The behavior of the Automatic option in the Render Output File dialog and elsewhere now depends on the image file type. No conversion is applied for formats that are typically linear (such as EXR), while the output transforms that are specified in the Color Management Settings are used for other formats.
• The Bake to Texture tool now lets you select the color space for output files.
• The ColorSpaceNamePathSearch rule is available to match how image files were assigned to color spaces in OCIO v1.
• The version of OCIO has been updated to 2.3.2.

You can configure color management to suit the needs of your project in the Color Management Settings dialog (Rendering > Color Management). To revert to how color management worked by default in previous versions of 3ds Max, set Color Management Mode to Gamma Workflow.