CG Lighting Toolset Demo using Gaffer

[@ayneSFilms]

Thank you so much, really helpful video to get better understanding of gaffer coming from katana pipeline. I’m still hoping someone from gaffer community will record the masterclass going from complete scratch.

[@user-kp5vp7mg6p]

Wow, finally an introduction to gaffer.We're developing to use him as well, and for episodes and movies gaffer is really great! 哇，终于有介绍gaffer的了。我们也在开发使用他，对于剧集和电影来说，gaffer真的很棒

[@statixvfx1793]

Super interesting to see production examples. Thanks for sharing. Any chance you could run though the reader/loader boxes at the top? How do you collect the assets, cameras and lookdev. Collect nodes based on data in shotgun?

[@MrPurest]

There is various options for this - on the Okido project we loaded the latest (highest version) published camera, animation and layout, excluding versions with an "ignore" status. The file paths etc came from Ftrack (similar to shotgun), although getting this data from Ftrack was slow, (I wanted switching shots to be instant) - so I setup a mariadb shot database as a kind of cache. This would get updated from ftrack in the background, and allowed the nodes in Gaffer to get the data without any delay. I think you would have the same situation with shotgun. For the lookdev its a similar story, but it only needs to run when the artist clicks the button, so it doesn't slow down switching shots. The lookdev loader knows which lookdevs to load because every asset has a set named ASSET_[assetname], so its easy to get the list of what to load. Internally most of the loaders are a scene loader node with a python expression driving the path. Although they got more complicated as the production went on and I added more features to them. For the Settlers project we were using shotgun, but the shot/asset count was quite manageable, so the loaders mostly work via path/version spreadsheets which I manually updated. For this Demo I don't have access to these production tracking systems anymore, so I have an sqlite database providing data where required.

[@statixvfx1793]

@@MrPurest Thanks for the detailed response. Was thinking something similar so its good to know im not far off.

[@arseniysemin1361]

Hi Rupert, can you possibly make a video on how to make a shot picker? I do understand the concept, but quite new to scripting, and I don't understand where to get more information that can help me make one myself.

[@MrPurest]

Hi, I may do some future videos covering more specific topics in depth, but not sure when I will get to this. There are some usefull examples in gaffers help menu eg: help>examples>rendering and I often turn to the "gafferdev" google group for info (many questions have already been asked and answered on here). I will try to provide an example shot picker settup later this week, and will put a link in the video description.

[@arseniysemin1361]

@@MrPurest Thank you so much!!! Very appreciate the help. I am on Discord and google group, but some topics are a little beyond my knowledge so I need to see once to get better understanding.

[@MrPurest]

blog.rat9.co.uk/ I put some details on here

[@arseniysemin1361]

@@MrPurest Thank you so much. Exactly what I was missing.

[@ehautomotive97]

Wow

[@JewTubeUsername]

How did you even do this? I can't even make the example files work, like that contact sheet example that comes with the software package. (There is an examples repository too, but I don't mean that one. I mean the examples that come with the installation) The wedge test does not work for me. I execute the 'wedge_roughness' node with a dispatcher. Then next I execute the ImageWrite at the bottom with a dispatcher. Both render the actual images just fine, but the context variables don't seem to work, leaving the "ImageReader" in the "Load source renders" box unable to display anything since it uses. contactSheet:column and contactSheet:row variables. But it always shows a red warning triangle. If I manually check the path then all the image files are there, and the naming convention matches, so if the variables worked, then the filenames would be correct. But they are not. And variables are so important....

[@MrPurest]

Not sure what issues you are running into, but for sure Gaffer can be a bit confusing when you get started. Try to get a bit more familiar with how the context variables work, maybe in a simpler graph, setting the variable with a context variable node and/or the global variables. I can help you set stuff up if you have a project with a budget.

[@MrPurest]

blog.rat9.co.uk/

[@JewTubeUsername]

@@MrPurest I, sadly, can not make a simpler graph because I cannot spawn any loop nodes like the example does. They're documented, they're in the examples, but I can't add any myself, all other nodes are there.

[@JewTubeUsername]

I found my error after reading more on node propagation, when I focused the image reader node, it was full of errors, but when I focused the loop node, it ...showed the aggregated result in the loop node, meaning, it showed the image in the loop node. this was not intuitive to me but at least I know it works...