Because Gaffer is a procedural system, modifications to objects are made by applying nodes to the scene, using filters to determine which objects within the scene are affected by a particular node. Commonly a PathFilter is used to select all the objects whose names match a particular pattern. Patterns are powerful, but do rather keep you at arm’s length from the objects by referring to them by name rather than visually. There is another way…
Continue reading “Drag and drop objects to assign shaders”Category: Artist Tips
Selecting upstream and downstream nodes
When reorganising a node network, you often want to move all the nodes upstream from a particular point in the graph. You can Shift+Alt-click to select all such nodes and drag them to a new location.
Use autocomplete in path widgets
If you’ve spent much time in a UNIX shell, you probably already know and love tab completion, whereby hitting the tab key will autocomplete the current filename based on the first few characters entered. It’s particularly handy for navigating the kind of deep directory structures that seem to typify VFX job structures. It’s worth knowing that Gaffer’s path widgets support the same tab complete mechanism – just type part of the name, hit tab and if possible it’ll be completed for you. Here’s an example.
Continue reading “Use autocomplete in path widgets”Exploring and rendering the exploding Droid from Elysium
Reading Alembic files and rendering through Arnold
in this video we show renders of an Alembic cache being sent to the Gaffer display, the creation of lights and some very basic shader-network construction.
Working with the image viewer
This video shows a quick preview of some of Gaffer’s current 2D viewing and processing capabilities.We demonstrate panning and zooming, scrubbing/stepping through frames, colour inspecting, grading, and enabling/disabling nodes. Images courtesy of Blender Foundation
Exploring scene hierarchies
A quick run through of some of the scene exploration techniques.