Author: John Haddon

Gaffer 0.61 includes a significant overhaul of the Editor Focus Menu, which determines which nodes are shown in each editor panel. The slightly confusing “Follow Editor” options are gone, replaced with a new “Follow Focus Node” setting. This makes editor focus simpler to manage, but more importantly enables long-awaited new features…

Diego Garcia Huerta seems to be on a one man mission to integrate all of the things with ShotGun, I mean Autodesk ShotGrid. This time it is Gaffer’s turn, and he’s open sourced an integration with support for file management, asset loading and publishing and other goodies. Head on over to his GitHub repository to learn more and give it a whirl.

Hypothetical Inc. have developed Emulsion, a new product which extends Gaffer’s rendering capabilities to include the VRay renderer. Currently in public beta testing, Emulsion includes the features that VRay users have enjoyed throughout its 21 year history, including highly tunable render settings, fast GI rendering of interior and exterior scenes, extensive shader nodes and smooth handling of very large scenes.

Eric Mehl of Hypothetical has been busy using Gaffer’s procedural scene generation and rendering to recreate Welikia, the ecosystem of New York City before settlement by Europeans. There’s an overview of the work on Hypothetical’s website, and a discussion of the Gaffer workflow on their blog. Windows users might know Eric from his Herculean efforts to port Gaffer to Windows, and his integration of Deadline with Gaffer. Thanks for sharing, Eric!

Sets are a powerful and commonly used tool in production pipelines, but they are not without their dangers. In this post we look at the details of how they work, and share some tips for avoiding their pitfalls.

Execute the following via the PythonEditor :

import GafferScene
n = GafferScene.ShaderAssignment()
n["in"]["childNames"].setValue( IECore.InternedStringVectorData( [ 
    "turtles", "all", "the", "way", "down"
] ) )
root.addChild( n )

Then look at the innocent looking ShaderAssignment node in the HierarchyView, and marvel at its recursive uselessness.

How does this work? Answers on the back of a postcard please…

Let’s face it, there’s only so much you can learn about Gaffer from a ball of cows. Wouldn’t it be great if there were some more comprehensive examples that resembled how you might work in a studio environment? Something with real assets and light rigs, that showed how to build a multi-shot workflow using a single template script? Well, now there is!