Gaffer 1.5.0.0 alpha 3

[johnhaddon]

Features

• ColorChooser :
  • Added sliders for TMI (temperature, magenta, intensity) color space.
  • Added color field, a widget giving control of two channels of "RGB", "HSV" or "TMI" triplets. The third channel is held constant.
  • The color field and RGB, HSV and TMI slider groups can now be toggled on or off.
  • Default visibility of the UI elements can now be set at startup by setting colorChooser:inline: and colorChooser:dialogue: entries for the inline chooser and dialogue chooser respectively, with the following suffixes :
    • visibleComponents : A string where each character is a visible component slider. Optional components are rgbhsvtmi.
    • staticComponent : A single character string for the component to use as the static component for the color field. The other two components in the "RGB", "HSV" and "TMI" triplets will be controllable in the widget.
    • colorFieldVisible : A boolean indicating if the color field should be visible or not.
  • Added a menu item to the color chooser settings to save the UI configuration for the inline color chooser and the dialogue color chooser as a startup script to persist the configuration across Gaffer restarts.
• MeshToLevelSet : Added destination plug, allowing multiple input meshes to be merged into a single level set at an arbitrary location.
• LevelSetToMesh : Added destination plug, allowing multiple input level sets to be merged into a single mesh at an arbitrary location.
• Cycles : Added support for OSL shading with Optix devices.

Improvements

• Cycles :
  • Added is_sphere plug to spot and point lights. Disabling is_sphere is equivalent to enabling "Soft Falloff" in Blender, which reverts the light to the behaviour of Cycles 3.6 and earlier.
  • Changed sampling pattern to blue noise dithered sampling.
  • Spot, disk, quad and point light strength now better match Blender, Arnold and hdCycles. As a result these lights are now pi times brighter at the same intensity when compared with previous versions. If necessary, this adjustment can be disabled by setting the GAFFERCYCLES_USE_LEGACY_LIGHTS environment variable with a value of 1.
  • Simplified presentation of principled_bsdf, principled_hair_bsdf, and principled_volume shaders in the Graph Editor. A subset of parameter nodules are now visible by default, the remainder can be accessed by clicking on or connecting to the node's + icon and choosing the parameter to make visible.
• Arnold : Added support for Int64Data and UInt64Data custom attributes, allowing USD's instanceId to be used as a custom attribute in the Instancer node. Warnings are emitted if values are out of range for Arnold's 32 bit ints.

Fixes

• Viewer : Fixed hangs when focussing a node for the first time (bug introduced in 1.5.0.0a2).
• Cycles : Fixed issue where scaling unnormalized quad and disk lights would not affect their brightness.
• SceneReader : Fixed crash reading facevarying normals skinned with UsdSkel.
• ShaderView : Fixed crash caused by a SceneCreator returning None.

Breaking Changes

• Cycles : Removed custom handling of unnormalized lights. We now rely on Cycles' inbuilt behaviour which results in a brightness difference for unnormalized point, spot and disk lights.
• MeshToLevelSet : Objects which are not meshes are now converted to an empty VDB grid, instead of being left unchanged.
• LevelSetToMesh :
  • Objects which are not level sets are now converted to an empty mesh, instead of being left unchanged.
  • Removed the adjustBounds plug. In the rare case where it is important to recompute slightly tighter bounds, one workaround is to use ShufflePrimitiveVariables to shuffle from "P" to "P" with adjustBounds checked.
  • Removed support for grid types other than FloatGrid. If other types are required, please request them.

Build

• Cortex : Updated to version 10.5.9.5.
• OpenShadingLanguage :
  • Updated to version 1.13.11.0.
  • Enabled Optix support.

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This discussion was created from the release Gaffer 1.5.0.0 alpha 3.