Shantae Futa
Added 2019-09-02 22:20:56 +0000 UTCI read more about SFM and its limitations when it comes to color management.
Incase it's hard to visualize the problem. Imagine you have two lights shining on top of a paper.
If you want the color cyan you can combine one green and one blue light. This gives you the cyan but it also means the paper will almost turn white again due to the overexposure.
You can't win in this situation because if you tone down the colors of the lights you instead get either gray or greyish blue. Sometimes it's not noticeable if the model itself is prebaked with colors (such as Ashe or D.Va) but today most models are just blank canvases like the paper I mentioned.
Blender's solution is to have color correction done in post (after rendering)
https://i.imgur.com/nYL4KH8.png
The main issue is that even though Blender did it's job, it did not understand that the face should be more red because most artists configure a simple render setup that envelops the entire character. In reality the fingers and ears should be more red while the arms are more white due to muscle and bone blocking light from exiting and giving it that red fade.
But apparently SFM has the ability to give you, the artist, the chance to do the color correction yourself. And after exporting I tried it out.
https://i.imgur.com/Ziae0P0.png
Left is the SFM render output + data embedded which we can't visually see. Right is the image color corrected through the data which Blender usually does for you but as you can see the character is almost the same color from body to head. After more color correction I managed to keep the head more red while the body remained lighter.
And now we have gone through the same process as Blender and beaten SFM's limitations.
