Mike Cauchi shows how to get better color blending when doing lookdev by converting to HSV and then back to RGB.

We’ve all made a ramp or gradient and had less-than-spectacular results in some regions of the color change. Here, Mike Cauchi, a Senior lookdev artist at Digital Domain, shows a tip for getting better and less “dirty” colors when mixing colors in a lookdev environment like Maya’s Hypershade or any other node-based editor.

The issue comes from blending color channel values rather than the actual colors.

“Converting to HSV before blending can be a cheap trick that gets you in the ballpark of what you want without creating stacks of multiplied and remapped masks if you don’t need truly accurate results.”