Gaffer 1.6 Is Here! (Patreon)

My favorite scene assembly and rendering app, Gaffer, just came out with a great new release. There are a ton of new features and I’ll highlight some of my favorites here. Let’s check it out!

Focal Blur

This new node provides a quick and easy way to add depth of field to any render with a depth (Z) AOV. This isn’t a super advanced tool when compared with Nuke’s ZDefocus, for example, but it does provide surprisingly nice results and is very easy to use. You can even plug in existing cameras to import settings like f-stop and focal length.

Arnold Multi-Layer EXRs

Gaffer used to be limited to rendering Arnold AOVs to separate files. This approach is fine in many situations, even preferable, but it can also get annoying to keep track of a ton of images. Now, if you set the same output for each AOV, Gaffer will write them all to one file. Of course you can still use the old default by specifying individual file names.

Image Selection Tool

You can now interactively select scene elements in rendered images. All you need is an ID AOV, a manifest or cryptomatte. Yep, you can even drag and drop selections to path filters, sets or the Python editor!

ONNX CUDA

Gaffer 1.6 introduces experimental support for running ONNX models in CUDA (GPU) mode. I played around with this while it was in the testing phase and the speed improvements over CPU are massive. For example, in my image upscaling test scene the upscale takes 10 seconds instead of 20 minutes on CPU.

RenderMan Out of Preview

RenderMan is no longer in preview and is now enabled automatically if you have RenderMan installed. There are still some missing features, the big one being XPU. Probably most solo/indie users won’t want to use RenderMan in RIS mode since it’s so slow, but if you have a powerful processor it will be manageable. XPU support should be coming soon!

Conclusion

Check out the full Gaffer 1.6.0.0 release notes and download the official builds for Windows and Linux: https://github.com/GafferHQ/gaffer/releases/tag/1.6.0.0

And don’t forget you can use my Gaffer Windows Installer to make setup on Windows even easier: https://github.com/BrianHanke/gaffer_windows_installer/releases/tag/2024.10.0

Enjoy!