CG News: Major New Gaffer Release (Patreon)

My favorite 3D app, Gaffer, is out with a fantastic new release, 1.5.9! Let’s have a look at the improvements that have me most excited.

RenderMan Support

RenderMan in Gaffer is a monumental addition. Why? After all, Gaffer has great Cycles support which covers most rendering use cases. For those who need a truly “pro” workflow, Arnold is also very tightly integrated. However, Arnold is thoroughly in the clutches of Autodesk at this point and, while it’s a great renderer, it’s not a great solution for indie users because of its high cost.

Enter RenderMan. Not only is it possibly the greatest renderer in the world and incredibly flexible and feature rich, it also offers a non-commercial version for personal projects and learning. Plus, commercial licenses are perpetual, a very welcome offering in this world of subscription-only software.

Since this is the first Gaffer release with RenderMan support it’s lacking a few features and there are some bugs and workflow issues to iron out. But, the Gaffer devs are the best of the best and RenderMan works shockingly well already. Enabling it is simple. Just add a GAFFERRENDERMAN_FEATURE_PREVIEW=1 environment variable and make sure you have RenderMan 26.3 installed.

After those setup steps, Gaffer will have a fully-populated RenderMan menu and RenderMan will be available for interactive and batch renders.

You can render to a Catalogue, to disk or even to RenderMan’s it frame buffer.

When playing around with this I was reminded how truly fantastic RenderMan looks. I love Cycles, but when you need that extra something special you can’t beat RenderMan. If I had to choose a single word to describe the look, it would be “radiant.”

RenderMan in Gaffer is also great for large-scale studio use. RenderMan is very popular at the highest levels of production and this will make Gaffer an even more appealing choice.

Cycles Volumes and Particles

Gaffer’s support for Cycles has been in a great spot for a long time, but there were a couple problems. First, volume rendering was buggy. It was difficult to make changes to parameters without crashing. You could still get the results you wanted, but it wasn’t pleasant. Second, particle motion blur was flat-out broken. The start and end of motion blur trails had a radius of 0, resulting in pointy blurs.

Both issues are fixed in Gaffer 1.5.9. Volume rendering now works just as smoothly as everything else. For the motion blur problem, and I’m biased on this one, I submitted a small patch which was merged into the official release. It’s working great now!

Here’s a campfire scene with a volume and particle blur that I made a while ago in Bifrost and Maya, rendered fresh with Cycles in Gaffer. It only took 20-30 seconds per frame on GPU and honestly the final look is as good as the original Arnold render, if not better.

Get Gaffer 1.5.9

Head on over to GitHub to download Gaffer 1.5.9: https://github.com/GafferHQ/gaffer/releases/tag/1.5.9.0

You can also use my handy Gaffer Windows Installer to automatically set up any Gaffer release: https://github.com/BrianHanke/gaffer_windows_installer/releases/tag/2024.10.0

Enjoy!