How To Configure ACES / OCIO For Blender 3.0 And Up

The year of 2021 has been quite eventful in the world of 3D graphics because it finally happened… Blender 3.0 was released in all of its beauty. Countless new features, updates and optimizations. But a little unsung hero snuck its way into the mix and that hero is ACES. Originally, implementing ACES with Blender was a pain in the @$% but now, it is a breeze and once you have it set up, you are set for each update (at least in the foreseeable future).

For those of you who don’t know what ACES is, think of it as a god-send to those who work with CG in the video world. It helps bridge the countless color space configurations out there and simplify the process of adding CG to your video.

* Please know that this is not a tutorial on HOW to use ACES in your workflow, but how to configure ACES with Blender.

1) Download ACES

First, let’s go to OpenColorIO.org’s GitHub and you can look through the available ACES versions. To download, click the green code button found near the top which reveal a dropdown menu. From there, you can click ‘Download .zip‘.

Next, unzip the folder and once unzipped, look inside the folder and then you will see a few folders with different versions such as, ‘aces_1.0.3’, ‘aces_1.1’, ‘aces_1.2’ and a few others. For this tutorial, we are going to be linking ACES 1.2 to Blender as the 1.2 version works beautifully with Davinci Resolve (my go to video editing software).

Once you have the folder selected, let’s relocate it somewhere on our system that we can reference later. I personally have an extra SSD that I store files on so I will keep it there. So for my case, it will live on my ‘D:/__OCIO_Color_Profiles/aces_1.2‘. If your pipeline requires multiple versions of ACES, you can just store each version there and change which version you are using per project.

2) Create System Wide Variable That Points To Our ACES Library

Of course, the process is different for each operating system. So below, you will find a link for each operating system and how you can set it up for your machine.

• Windows
• Mac OS
• Linux

Windows

1. For Windows users, navigate to your ‘Search Bar’ (bottom left) and type in ‘system environment’ and amongst the results, click on ‘ Edit The System Environment Variables‘ found in the control panel.
2. Once inside the ‘System Properties’, you will see a button towards the bottom called ‘Environment Variables‘ which you will then click on.
3. From here, you will see two boxes with variable lists. The top is the User variables and the bottom is the System variables. We simply need to add a new System variable so click on ‘New‘.
4. Make the Name, ‘OCIO’.
5. And make the Value the path to your ACES version we stored earlier along with the config file found inside like so, ‘C:/your/path/to/aces_1.2/config.ocio‘. For my machine, it looks like ‘D:/__OCIO_Color_Profiles/aces_1.2/config.ocio‘. Please notice the config file found at the end. This will tell Blender how to set up the color profile.
6. That is it! Your OCIO color variable will be recognized by Blender next time you open.

Mac OS

For Mac, things appear to be a bit more complicated in that you don’t have a dedicated UI for setting variables but in reality, it’s as easy as typing a few lines of code.

1. Lets start by opening your Terminal. To do this, you can navigate to your ‘Spotlight Search‘ in the top right and search ‘terminal’.
2. Once inside we need to check where you can edit/add your environment variables which will either be in the .bash_profile or the .zprofile. All in all, Apple changed things up for newer Macs so if your Mac is relatively new, you will be editing the .zprofile. To check this, type ‘echo $SHELL‘ and if the terminal prints the message ‘/bin/zsh’ then we will be editing the .zprofile , if not, to the .bash_profile with you!
3. To open this file, we will use Mac OS built in text editor ‘TextEdit’ and to open this file from the terminal, simply type ‘open -a TextEdit ~/.zprofile‘ (‘open -a TextEdit ~/.bash_profile’ if you didn’t see /bin/zsh). This will open the .zprofile inside of TextEdit for us to add our variable in.
4. Inside of TextEdit, type in ‘OCIO=/your/path/to/aces_1.2/config.ocio‘. For my machine, this looks like ‘OCIO=/Users/paperkrane/Documents/OCIO/aces_1.2/config.ocio‘. Please notice the config file found at the end. This will tell Blender how to set up the color profile.
5. Save your .zprofile file with File > Save and close out of TextEdit.
6. That is it! Your OCIO color variable will be recognized by Blender next time you open.

Linux

A little disclaimer. I do not own, nor have any experience with Linux so the following is just what I found. So if there is anything I need to add to this article or a mistake that I may have made, just please let me know.

1. Open your Terminal (ctrl+alt+T).
2. Inside your Terminal, type ‘nano .bash_profile‘. This will open the .bash_profile inside of Linux’s default text editor Nano.
3. Inside of your .bash_profile, add your environment variable. It will look something like, ‘OCIO=/path/to/your/aces_1.2/config.ocio‘.
4. Save your .bash_profile.
5. That is it! Your OCIO color variable will be recognized by Blender next time you open.