In response to a report in Support files for 3dsMax 2025 in Deadline 10.3 - #6 by Gary_Sanderson
I’m seeing the same problem.
I just tried a new scene in 3ds Max 2025 using Scanline renderer and all defaults. Color management mode is OCIO - 3ds Max Default, and the default output transform is Display/View with sRGB / ACES 1.0 SDR-video. When Deadline renders this, the file is written out as Raw, which is unexpected. Specifying a custom output transform on the file does not help.
Switching the renderer to Redshift (so I can see my own log messages), I noticed the following things:
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In a normal 3ds Max interactive session, the color management settings are applied prior to plugins receiving the NOTIFY_FILE_POST_OPEN notification. 3ds Max switches color management mode to OCIO - 3ds Max Default when loading my scene, which is correct as that’s what’s stored in the scene.
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In a Deadline session, color management switches to OCIO - 3ds Max Default at startup, but then before receiving NOTIFY_FILE_POST_OPEN it gets switched to Unmanaged. Curiously, after rendering (i.e. after the call to
Renderer::Close()) the mode is switched back to OCIO - 3ds Max Default. -
A similar problem happens when rendering the scene with 3dsMaxCmd, except the color management mode is not changed after
Renderer::Close().
Should be noted I’m using 3ds Max 27.2 (2025.2) and saving as PNG.
To work around the issue in 3dsMaxCmd, I used -preRenderScript and created a script file containing the following statement as per documentation:
ColorPipelineMgr.mode = #OCIO_Default
However, trying the same thing in the Deadline job (by setting the above as the Inline Post Load Script), the render session gets the correct color management configuration but Deadline still writes out the file without color management.
Something funky is definitely going on here. The same issue happens when using OCIO in 3ds Max 2024.