Khronos introduces mapper for accurate 3D colours in eCommerce

The Khronos Group, a consortium dedicated to creating graphics and computing standards, has introduced the "Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper." The new specification aims to assist 3D artists in matching the base colours of real-world objects more accurately during physically-based rendering (PBR), a crucial requirement in fields such as eCommerce, architecture, and CAD.

The Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper addresses a significant challenge faced by 3D content creators: the difficulty of rendering certain bright colours accurately on an sRGB screen using traditional tone mappers like ACES. These tools often have limitations, rendering some shades of yellow, green, and cyan unreachable. This issue has become particularly noticeable in eCommerce contexts where 3D renderings and photographs are displayed side-by-side.

Historically, many artists have avoided using tone mappers to mitigate colour accuracy issues, often resulting in additional complications such as hue skew and visual artefacts. The new tone mapper from Khronos promises to reduce these problems by allowing artists to verify colour values within texture files, ensuring that the final render retains the desired colours. This advancement is expected to streamline the content creation process, reducing the need for guesswork and potentially shortening the quality assurance (QA) cycles.

The Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper is already enjoying support and adoption from major 3D tools and engines, including Autodesk, Blender, Babylon.js, Filament, Phasmatic, Three.js, and Threekit. This broad acceptance underscores the industry's recognition of the specification's potential to solve enduring colour accuracy issues in 3D renderings.

According to Emmett Lalish, a staff software engineer at Google and a member of the Khronos Group's 3D Commerce and glTF Working Groups, "A common pain point in 3D content creation is achieving vivid, real-life colours for 3D objects using physically-based rendering. The Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper enables everyone in the content production pipeline to create and display accurate, photorealistic models."

The PBR Neutral Tone Mapper is described as simple to implement and efficient to run, requiring just 13 lines of GLSL shading language code for the sample implementation. While the current version supports output to sRGB, future updates are expected to expand to additional outputs. Plans are also in place to integrate exposure controls to manage real-world lighting values more precisely.

This product marks a significant step toward more consistent and realistic colour representation in 3D assets, particularly beneficial for the eCommerce, architectural visualisation, and product design industries. The specification is available in open source, with community feedback and enhancements encouraged via Khronos' GitHub repository.

Industry feedback has been positive. Henrik Edstrom, a distinguished software architect at Autodesk, noted that tone mapping has been a significant challenge across many content creation pipelines, particularly in eCommerce. He emphasised the value of the PBR Neutral Tone Mapper in workflows where "no tone mapping" was often the norm.