Gaffer 1.3.1.0

[johnhaddon]

Features

• USDShader : Added a node for loading shaders from USD's SdrRegistry. This includes shaders such as UsdPreviewSurface and UsdUVTexture, which are now available in the USD/Shader section of the node menu.
• USDLight : Added a node for defining UsdLux lights. This is available from the USD/Light section of the node menu.
• SceneReader, SceneWriter : Added limited support for reading and writing Usd Volume prims.

Improvements

• LightEditor : Added section displaying UsdLux shadow parameters.
• Cycles : Added support for UsdLux lights.
• LightTool : Added support for editing animated plugs.
• Median, Erode, Dilate : Improved performance significantly for wide filters. Measured improvements of 100x faster for Erode/Dilate, and 10x faster for Median.

Fixes

• SceneWriter : Fixed writing of UsdLux lights.
• Viewer : Fixed visualisation of shaping cones for UsdLux lights, which were previously drawn at half the correct angle.
• DisplayTransform : Fixed missing view presets when display is at the default value (Small Bug with DisplayTransform Node's new Default Display #5392).
• Arnold
  • Fixed translation of vector typed outputs defined as vector <name> in an output definition.
  • Fixed translation of shadow:enable and shadow:color parameters on UsdLux lights, which were previously ignored.
• LightTool : Fixed bug causing non-settable plugs to be enabled, such as plugs with an expression as input or those using the default spreadsheet row for their value. This generated the error ERROR : EventSignalCombiner : Cannot set value for plug {plug} except during computation.
• LightEditor : Fixed toggling values in cases where inherited light attributes were set by a script context variable without including a default.
• GLWidget : Fixed rare crash when showing a GLWidget for the first time.
• BranchCreator : Fixed bug which could cause inconsistent hashes to be generated.
• Cycles :
  • Fixed rendering of meshes with faceted normals, which were previously being rendered as smooth. This applies to meshes without an N primitive variable, and meshes where N has Uniform or FaceVarying interpolation. Note that Cycles has no native support for FaceVarying interpolation so that in this case all faces are rendered faceted.
  • Fixed translation of Uniform N primitive variables. These are now available to be queried from the standard Ng attribute in Cycles.
• ImageSampler : Fixed handling of exceptional floating point values. Now returns inf if inf values are present in the image, rather than 3.4e38.
• Merge :
  • Fixed the Difference operation to return correct values for exceptional floating point values. Now there is 0 difference between inf and inf, or NaN and NaN. Additionally, there is infinite difference between NaN and any other number, so assertImagesEqual will correctly report NaNs that don't belong.
  • Fixed the Divide operation to return 0 for 0/0. This is consistent with how we previously handled fully black tiles, and avoids introducing NaN values which create problems in compositing.
• Median/Erode/Dilate : Fixed possible crash bug if there were NaNs in the input image.
• ValuePlug : Fixed bug which caused ComputeNode::computeCachePolicy() to be called unnecessarily for input plugs in some circumstances. This could affect performance, particularly when the plug belonged to a node implemented in Python.

API

• OptionalValuePlug : Added a new plug type that pairs an enabled BoolPlug with a value ValuePlug.
• Shader : Added support for using OptionalValuePlug to represent optional parameters.

Build

• Cortex : Updated to version 10.5.1.0.

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This discussion was created from the release Gaffer 1.3.1.0.

[PhoenixDigitalFX]

Please implement Moonray renderer in gaffer .

[johnhaddon]

Have you used Moonray in production? What would you say are its benefits over other renderers Gaffer supports?

[BrianHanke]

I was one of the first people in the general public to get MoonRay compiled and running in Houdini (CentOS 7) after it went open source. It's kind of a nightmare to build, but once it was working I was very impressed by it. Decent render times, beautiful images, and an extremely artist-friendly workflow. I've often thought Gaffer plus MoonRay would be a truly spectacular open source powerhouse. I'd migrate from Arnold in a heartbeat.

[boberfly]

I do have some code inroads to make some kind of integration but I haven't had the dedicated man-months to do a proper job of it. The code I got can already scrape the metadata out of Moonray and generate Gaffer nodes, so you could use it to make data and bake it to a USD probably with the proper schema. Now with the added Lux light support in Gaffer, I could whip up something basic here, provided you use another tool that can render straight USD...