1 min read Artist Tips

0.56 series: New features recap

As adoption of Gaffer 0.56 or later is contingent on moving to Arnold 6, we appreciate it may take a little longer to switch production shows over. People may also move directly to the the upcoming release of 0.57.

This post contains a quick recap of the main artist-facing changes in the 0.56 series for those moving up more recently.

Features

  • Deep image support: GafferImage now supports deep image compositing, new 'Deep' prefixed nodes provide deep data specific operations.
  • MergeScenes: This new node allows the hierarchies of two independent scenes to be merged.
  • ShuffleAttributes, ShufflePrimitiveVariables: These nodes allow a locations attributes and primvars to be renamed/copied.
  • Lighting texture visualisation: The viewer now supports the visualisation of light textures and gobos, along with more general improvements to light and camera visualisation.
  • Crop 2D + improved UX: The Crop Window Tool can now be used from the image view and is easier to edit.
  • Catalogue columns: The Catalogue now shows the status of a render and supports custom columns, to integrate shot data, etc.

Improvements

💡
0.56 introduced some breaking changes:

Bug fixes to the ImageReader, ImageWriter and Resize nodes mean that the generated images will differ substantially in some circumstances.

The following nodes have renamed plugs and/or added features, such that files saved in 0.56 are not fully compatible with 0.55 : Instancer, OpenGLAttributes, Light and Camera.

See the full release notes for more details.

Further reading:

Tom