Talk - Practical Pigment Mixing for Digital Painting

Hi all! This is our presentation from SIGGRAPH Asia 2021.

It's quite a letdown when you paint in Photoshop or Procreate, and you get grey instead of green when mixing blue and yellow. In this video, we talk about the reasons why no professional painting software implemented realistic pigment mixing so far.
We explain how pigment mixing works and how we achieved to pack all the physics into a practical RGB-in, RGB-out model for natural color mixing - Mixbox.

We are happy to announce that Mixbox will be coming out in the newest release of Rebelle as their Rebelle Pigments feature!

Don't hesitate to ask any questions down in the comments.
Hope you enjoy it!

Secret Weapons
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#mixbox #pigments #colormixing

[secretweapons]

Hey guys, thanks a lot for your comments and interest! To those asking how to get Mixbox in their favorite painting software - Mixbox is a module for developers, it needs to be implemented within the software. The integration is fairly easy and quick but it has to be done by the creators of the software themselves.
So, the best way to get Mixbox into Photoshop, Clip Paint Studio, etc. is to tell them that you want it there! If they see the demand, they might get it for you :)

[CVerse]

This is a tremendous achievement in digital painting that I’m hoping other software will incorporate this natively in the future. We REALLY need this as artists! I’ll be sharing this around my SIGGRAPH student chapter, CSUF ACM SIGGRAPH

[artaccelerator]

This almost made me cry with joy! I also really enjoyed the entire video and explanation! Thank you so much for sharing your experience with this process and for advancing digital art through your results!

[TheMokeleMbembe]

This is so cool. I have been experimenting w the Rebelle demo and noticed this feature/difference. Despite years of using physical oils & gouache as well as Photoshop, Krita, Corel Painter, I had never been able to put that fine a point on this difference (I used the digital tools much differently than the traditional media, which accounts for that in part). I am so glad someone figured out how to do this and then was able to get it implemented!

[fiser]

A small, self-contained problem with such an impact. Love it!

[dv]

FINALLY! I've been wishing for this for soooo long! I will be forever grateful that you have crossed that frontier and broken the barriers!

[davirosa]

AMAZING GUYS! I smiled a lot when you applied the phatalo blue over a bright background... You Know? That´s the exact effect of transparent pigments painted in a thin wash...
I got here cause I´m sick of digital oil brushes! LoL - But my wish is far away more simple. I just wish that they pull and mix just a little more consistently - to "grab" more paint from canvas...
I´m looking forward to see your source in a painting software!!

[cyanidebass]

Finally one pertinent and practical view about this topic we hardly find informations about ! thanks

[nikolaikai]

Thank you for all the hard work you've put into this! I love digital painting but the old color mixing system where everything gets dull and grey has always been a huge source of frustration. This is a big step towards bridging the digital/analog gap. Tremendous work! 👍

[Halefall]

16:24 Look at that!! this is absolutely fantastic, thank you so so much for researching and developing this!

[KazuAnki]

This's crazy. You guys are amazing!!!

[KazuAnki]

THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH ! I finally understand why my digital painting look disgusting after blending🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻 The math examples are so cool !! And this's why we always wonder why real oil paintings look better than digital ones even if there are professional !

[volotat]

Wow, what an amazing work. I never thought the problem of color mixing might be so complex.

[mazetrap]

Well, I see the video is from December 2021 when Rebelle already announced the pigments in their Rebelle 5, a bit later CSP 2.0 also added it and I heard some other programs have it too, like Corel or one other but I don't remember the name (I never used it but my friend does).

[erevanayen]

These people are single-handedly revolutionizing the cgi industry and it's awesome to watch. Great work!

[theblowupdollsmusic]

Thank you for pushing digital art forward.

[PiercingSight]

Honestly this should have been a common standard since day one! I'm actually surprised it hasn't been implemented yet. I could have sworn there were already such algorithms out there.

Also, I am a bit sad that the code isn't under a Creative Commons or GPL license. Don't get me wrong, y'all deserve a lot of credit for this! But this feels like something that should belong to everyone, especially considering the algorithm itself has been around since 1931. I'm certain other implementations will eventually pop up under more open licenses.

But again, y'all are awesome for this!

[_spartan]

I never thought about this problem before.

[bowreshma]

Is the version of rebelle you tested/showed Rebelle 5? That version has natural pigment mixing.

[JanPospisilArt]

Cool to see, hopefully it gets adopted into more software.
(ArtRage has had a real color mixing mode for a while and it does pretty much the same thing. Or at least the output is similar, obviously the inner workings might be different.)