Gaffer 1.6.14.0

[johnhaddon]

Improvements

• MergeMeshes, MergeCurves, MergePoints : Added sortKey, sortPrimitiveVariable and sortOrder plugs, to control the order primitives are merged in.
• RenderMan :
  • Added support for RenderMan 27.2 and removed support for RenderMan 27.0. Support for RenderMan 26.3 and 26.4 remains unchanged. We hate to remove support for a version within a minor Gaffer release, but RenderMan versions are coming thick and fast and we have to draw the line somewhere.
  • Improved InteractiveRender responsiveness.
• Transform Tools : Simplified display of the target node receiving transform edits. Plugs and non-viewable nodes are no longer included in the target path.
• Scene Editors : Simplified display of edit source in column tooltips, the inspect and edit popups, and history window. Plugs and non-viewable nodes are no longer included in the source path.
• PlugPopup : Improved default popup title. Plugs and non-viewable nodes are no longer included in the title.
• Viewer : Added D hotkey for toggling between denoised and undenoised layers.
• OSLShader : Added support for $shaderType:$shaderName:$parameterName style metadata keys for correspondingInput metadata.
• RenderMan shaders : Added correspondingInput metadata to allow automatic node connections when inserting a shader between an existing connection and pass-through connections when a shader is disabled.
• Dispatcher : Simplified jobs by removing tasks for nodes - such as Wedge - that do no work of their own. This is particularly noticeable in TractorDispatcher, resulting in simpler job graphs in the Tractor dashboard. This behaviour is enabled
  by default but can be temporarily disabled by setting the GAFFERDISPATCH_OMIT_EMPTY_TASKS environment variable to a value of 0. In future, the environment variable will be removed.
• TractorDispatcher : Added startPaused plug.
• TractorDispatcher, LocalDispatcher : Added context variable summary to task names.

Fixes

• TractorDispatcher : Fixed bug handling tasks which were dependend on by more than one downstream task.
• Wedge :
  • Fixed value preview widget's context handling. The widget now correctly updates when the context changes, and uses the correct context with respect to the focus node.
  • Fixed creation of context variables named "" if either the variable or indexVariable plugs had empty values.
• Arnold : Fixed handling of custom_attributes output parameter. This is now merged with header:* parameters rather than overwriting them.
• OSLImage : Fixed unnecessary dependency between input pixel data and output channel names. This fixes flickering in the Viewer's channel selector when viewing the output. This also fixes a loophole whereby theoretically a shader could change the output channel names based on the pixel values in the first image tile (shaders are now executed with a single black pixel to establish the output channel names).
• VectorDataWidget : Fixed circular reference in right-click popup menu.
• SceneInspector : Fixed ordering of Global Attributes - these are now sorted alphabetically like everything else.

API

• MetadataAlgo : Added firstViewableAncestor() and firstViewableNode() functions.
• Dispatcher : Added name() method to TaskBatch.

---

This discussion was created from the release Gaffer 1.6.14.0.