Current Limitations of Color Management

OCIO-based color management in 3ds Max provides an end-to-end workflow, ensuring properly managed colors for input, display, and output. However, color management has not been implemented for all features and areas of the interface.

Exposure Controls

The Exposure Controls are not aware of color management, and allow you to incorrectly apply a second tone-mapping operation on top of the view transform. For details, see Exposure and Color Management.

Additionally, the view and display transform are not applied to the Exposure Controls' Render Preview thumbnail.

Mixed Color Management Settings

Several operations can result in mixing sources that are based on different and potentially incompatible color management settings, which can result in unexpected colors or worse. In particular:

A Material Library might have been saved using different settings than the current scene.
A scene that is merged or referenced into the current scene might have been saved using different settings.

For best results, make sure that all files used in such operations are based on compatible color management settings. Ideally, they should use the same OCIO config file with the same rendering space and color-space assignment rules.

Literal Colors

Any literal color values (including solid colors and other color parameters) in the scene are assumed to be in the rendering space, but they are not converted when you change the rendering space of a scene that has already been set up. This can result in final colors that were not intended, so it's best to set up color management at the start of a new scene or project.

Viewport Display

OCIO-based color management is not available in the viewport when using the Nitrous Direct3D 9 (DX9) or Legacy OpenGL display drivers. However, image files are still rendered correctly.

In addition if a config file contains color spaces where some part of the transform is implemented through a referenced LUT file, those spaces are not supported by OSL shaders for viewport display.

ActiveShade Window

The ActiveShade window that is available from the Render flyout does not apply the view and display transforms, making it appear dark. This is not an issue when using ActiveShade directly in the viewports.

Object Color

Don't use object colors when color precision is needed. Object colors are stored internally as linear values using 8 bits per channel, and this low precision can cause inconsistencies seen in the color picker and elsewhere.

UV Editor

The UV Editor (Edit UVWs dialog) uses the Gamma Workflow to display textures in its workspace.

FBX Import and Export

Neither user-assigned input color spaces nor custom gamma values for texture files are supported by FBX files. When an FBX file is imported while using OCIO-based color management, the color spaces are automatically assigned by the Automatic Color Space Assignment Rules (see To edit color space assignment rules). Similarly while using Gamma Workflow, automatic gamma is used. This can result in colors appearing different — you can fix this manually by changing the textures' options after import.

Substance

Color management is not applied when loading Substance (.sbar) texture files.

RAM Player

The RAM Player does not apply view or display transforms. To show the correct colors, make sure that the appropriate transforms have already been baked into the images.

Rendering

The following renderers and render targets do not support OCIO-based color management.

ART renderer
VUE renderer
Autodesk A360 cloud rendering service
Hair and Fur buffer rendering method

Shared Views

Color management is not applied to views shared using File > Share View.

Civil View

Autodesk Civil View for 3ds Max is not color-managed.

Viewport Canvas

The Viewport Canvas tool is not compatible with color management.

Revit files

Files imported from Revit are not color-managed.

Color Clipboard

The Color Clipboard tool is not color-managed.