Gaffer 1.2.0.0a1

[johnhaddon]

This version enables Cycles support by default, as we believe we have made sufficient progress to allow wider testing. We may continue to make behaviour-changing updates if necessary though, so support is not yet considered final.

Note : Python 2 support has been removed. All builds are now using Python 3.

Features

• Windows : Added official builds for Windows.
• Mute/Solo : Added the ability to mute and solo lights.
  • A light can be muted by setting the light:mute attribute. If that attribute is not present, the light will not be muted.
  • One or more lights can be enabled exclusively via membership in the soloLights set. If that set has one or more members, only the lights in that set will emit. If the set is empty, all lights emit according to their mute state. If a light is both muted and in the soloLights set, it will emit.
  • Lights : Added a mute toggle, which can be accessed in the node editor from the Light Linking tab.
  • Added a visual indication to lights in the viewport when they are muted. Muted lights use a dark gray outline instead of yellow.
  • Cycles : Muted lights are disabled in renders.
  • Arnold : Muted lights are disabled in renders.
• HierarchyView : Added control over the Visible Set, which defines the locations within the scene that are loaded and rendered by the Viewer.
  • The Inclusions column adds locations to the Visible Set, so that they and their descendants are rendered in the Viewer without needing to be expanded in the HierarchyView.
  • The Exclusions column excludes locations from the Visible Set, so that they and their descendants are never rendered in the Viewer, regardless of any other expansions or inclusions.
  • Locations can have their Visible Set inclusion or exclusion toggled by clicking within the appropriate column. Shift-clicking will remove the location and any of its descendants from the Visible Set. When multiple locations are selected, edits to any of the selected locations will affect all selected locations.

Improvements

• SceneReader :
  • Improved read performance for sets in USD files, with a benchmark reading a moderately large set seeing more than 2x speedup.
  • Improved cancellation responsiveness when reading large sets from USD files.
• SceneWriter : Improved performance when writing sets to USD files.

Fixes

• CodeWidget : Fixed auto-complete for pathlib.Path objects, and any other classes which throw AttributeError for an attribute advertised by dir().
• Expression : Fixed non-deterministic parsing order for Python expressions (Random plug ordering in promoted plugs connected to expressions #4935).
• FileSequencePathFilter : Fixed bug whereby files were considered to be part of a sequence if they were in a numbered directory. Now only numbers in the file's name are considered.
• BoolWidget : Fixed bug triggered by calling setImage() from within a with widgetContainer block.
• LevelSetOffset, MeshToLevelSet, LevelSetToMesh, SphereLevelSet : Fixed bugs which could cause unnecessary repeated computations, or in the worst case, lead to deadlock.
• ValuePlug : Fixed rare deadlock when a TaskParallel compute recurses to a Legacy compute with the same hash.
• GafferTest : Fixed bug which caused parallelGetValue() to use the wrong context.
• LightEditor : Fixed bug which could cause attribute edits to be made for a parent location instead of the desired one.
• BackgroundMethod : Fixed bug that could cause the postCall to be called on a widget that had already been removed from the UI.

API

• Filesystem path handling : Adopted std::filesystem::path and pathlib.Path in the C++ and Python APIs respectively, with automatic conversion between the two. These simplify common use cases, and provide for more elegant cross-platform path handling.
  • ScriptNode : serialiseToFile(), executeFile() and importFile() now take filesystem::path arguments.
  • Reference :
    • load() now takes a filesystem::path argument.
    • fileName() now returns a filesystem::path argument.
  • Box : exportForReference() now takes a filesystem::path argument.
  • ApplicationRoot :
    • savePreferences() now takes a filesystem::path argument.
    • preferencesLocation() now returns a filesystem::path.
  • StringPlug : Added a setValue() overload taking a filesystem::path.
  • Dispatcher : jobDirectory() now returns a filesystem::path.
  • Backups : File names are now represented using pathlib.Path.
  • TestCase : temporaryDirectory() now returns a pathlib.Path.
  • ShaderView : registerReferenceScene() now takes a filesystem::path.
  • Catalogue : save() and load() take a filesystem::path, and generateFileName() returns one.
  • ExtensionAlgo : exportExtension() now takes a pathlib.Path in the directory argument.
• PathColumn : Added buttonPressSignal(), buttonReleaseSignal() and buttonDoubleClickSignal(). These allow a PathColumn to implement its own event handling.
• Capsule : Removed attempts to detect invalidated Capsules.
• VisibleSet/VisibleSetData : Added struct used to define a subset of the scene to be rendered based on expansions, inclusions, and exclusions. This is used to allow scene locations to be defined as always or never renderable, overriding the usual UI expansion behaviour.
• ContextAlgo : Added setVisiblesSet(), getVisibleSet(), and affectsVisibleSet() methods.
• SceneGadget : Added setVisibleSet(), and getVisibleSet() methods.
• EditScopeAlgo : Added methods to modify and query modifications to set members in an Edit Scope.
• Widget : Added support for a _postContructor() method, which is called after the widget is fully constructed. This can be useful for performing post-initialisation work from a base class.
• GafferTest : Added ObjectPlug overloads for repeatGetValue() and parallelGetValue().
• SceneTestCase : Added assertParallelGetValueComputesObjectOnce(). This can be used to check that expensive computes are using an appropriate cache policy.
• Gaffer ( Python module ) : Added rootPath() and executablePath() methods.

Breaking Changes

• Signal : Removed disconnect( slot ) method. This was a performance hazard because it was linear in the number of connections. Use Connection::disconnect() instead, which is constant time.
• GafferTest : Removed expectedFailure() decorator. Use unittest.expectedFailure() instead.
• Python : Removed support for Python 2.
• SceneWriter :
  • Sets are now only written on the first frame for each file written.
  • SceneInterface::writeSet() is now used in preference to SceneInterface::writeTags() for all non-legacy file formats.
• SceneReader : SceneInterface::readSet() is now used in preference to SceneInterface::readTags() for all non-legacy formats.
• CatalogueUI : Hid OutputIndexColumn from public API.
• ContextAlgo : Removed use of the ui:scene:expandedPaths context variable. Any code directly accessing ui:scene:expandedPaths should instead use the getExpandedPaths()/setExpandedPaths()/expand()/expandDescendants() methods provided by ContextAlgo.
• SceneGadget : Removed setExpandedPaths() and getExpandedPaths() methods. setVisibleSet() and getVisibleSet() are now used instead.
• GafferUI : Removed the setReadOnly() and getReadOnly() methods from the following widgets :
  • GafferUI.PlugValueWidget
  • GafferUI.NodeEditor
  • GafferUI.NodeUI
  • GafferUI.PlugLayout
• Reference : The fileName() Python binding now returns a pathlib.Path argument, or None for empty file names.
• ApplicationRoot : The preferencesLocation() Python binding now returns a pathlib.Path argument.
• StringPlug : setValue( std::filesystem::path & ) now uses path.generic_string() for the value, whereas before an automatic conversion would have used path.string() (the native string).
  • Dispatcher : the jobDirectory() Python binding now returns a pathlib.Path, or None if it is empty.
• Context::EditableScope, ImagePlug::ChannelDataScope, ScenePlug::PathScope/SetScope : Removed deprecated functions which don't take pointers and require duplicating data.
• ViewportGadget : Removed deprecated gadgetsAt() signature.

Build

• Cortex : Updated to version 10.4.3.0.

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This discussion was created from the release Gaffer 1.2.0.0a1.

[BigRoy]

Windows : Added official builds for Windows.

Amazing effort!

[noizfactory]

Hi @johnhaddon and @ericmehl,

Is it possibe to please update the windows preview build with this fix that was just deployed in 1.1.7.0?

Arnold : Fixed rendering of token enum parameter values loaded from USD.

Thanks,
Sachin

[johnhaddon]

Yep, I've just released 1.2.0.0a2, which has all the latest fixes and some new stuff too. It's going through CI now, so builds should be available in an hour or so. https://github.com/GafferHQ/gaffer/releases/tag/1.2.0.0a2.

[noizfactory]

That's awesome! Thanks so much John!!

[johnhaddon]

The build is up now...

[noizfactory]

Thanks @johnhaddon! All good now and the fix is working as expected. Thank you so much for the prompt fix and release!

[LichiMan]

Thanks for this new release. I get an error in this new version that I don't get in 1.2.0.0a1 on Windows: ``` ERROR : IECore.loadConfig : Error executing file "C:\fbFiles\pipeline\software\windows\gaffer\1.2.0.0a2\startup\gui\lightEditor.py" - "File "maya/osl/pointLight" could not be found.". Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\fbFiles\pipeline\software\windows\gaffer\1.2.0.0a2\python\IECore\ConfigLoader.py", line 79, in loadConfig fileContextDict, fileContextDict File "C:\fbFiles\pipeline\software\windows\gaffer\1.2.0.0a2\startup\gui\lightEditor.py", line 95, in <module> shader.loadShader( light ) File "C:\fbFiles\pipeline\software\windows\gaffer\1.2.0.0a2\startup\GafferOSL\shaderNameCompatibility.py", line 152, in loadRenamedShader return originalLoadShader( self, renamed, **kwargs ) IECore.Exception: File "maya/osl/pointLight" could not be found. ``` Anyone on Windows get this error too? Thanks. Regards, Miguel

[LichiMan]

Also, I don't get the "Arnold" option in the drop down menu in the Light Editor panel.

[johnhaddon]

The error is coming from some startup code for GafferDelight - do you have 3delight installed?

The reason Arnold isn't showing up is that its startup code runs just after GafferDelight, so the error is preventing it from running. If you comment out lines 89 to 104 of startup/gui/lightEditor.py I would expect Arnold to be available again. Then we can figure out what was going wrong with 3delight...

[LichiMan]

No, I don't have 3delight. Just Arnold as a Third-Party renderer.
Commenting those lines the error goes away and Arnold comes back. Thanks.

[ericmehl]

I can confirm that error too, @LichiMan. I'll have a look this afternoon at it. John's fix for it (commenting out lines 89 to 104 of startup/gui/lightEditor.py works for me as a short-term fix.

[johnhaddon]

Thanks Eric. What we expect to happen is for the import GafferDelight to fail when 3delight isn't installed, so that we don't even try to load those shaders. That's what happens on Linux, but somehow on Windows we must be able to import it.

[ericmehl]

What we expect to happen is for the import GafferDelight to fail

Yeah, something must be wrong with GafferDelight, I don't have any problems importing it from a gaffer env python session.

[johnhaddon]

Can you import IECoreDelight? GafferDelight doesn't link directly on lib3delight, while IECoreDelight does (and GafferDelight links to IECoreDelight). I'm wondering if Windows loads dependencies lazily, so hasn't yet realised that lib3delight is missing...

[ericmehl]

Yes, I can import IECoreDelight and also IECoreDelight._IECoreDelight. But if try to render anything with 3Delight itself, I immediately get a crash due to a memory access violation, so something must not be right with GafferDelight and friends on Windows.

[ericmehl]

I have a candidate fix in #5082. If you're not using 3Delight, the manual fix above is as good as any. If you are, see my note on #5081 for an interim fix.