Getting started with Gaffer

Installing Gaffer

Downloading a release

The latest release is available to download from gafferhq.org. Previous releases can be downloaded from the GitHub releases page.

Installation

Each Gaffer release is a standalone archive that just requires extraction to the location you wish to run Gaffer from. See the documentation for more information.

Windows

On Windows, the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable must be installed. If you see errors related to missing VCRUNTIME files such as VCRUNTIME140.dll, the redestributable will need to be downloaded and installed before Gaffer can be launched.

3rd party installers

Brian Hanke maintains a Windows installer that downloads and extracts Gaffer releases. It can be downloaded from GitHub.

Configuring renderers

Cycles

Gaffer comes pre-installed with Cycles, so no additional configuration is required.

To disable Cycles, set the GAFFERCYCLES_HIDE_UI environment variable to 1.

Arnold

Gaffer currently supports both Arnold 7.2.x.x & 7.3.x.x releases. Earlier versions of Arnold are no longer compatible.

Note that Gaffer requires an Arnold SDK release to be installed - a MtoA, HtoA, KtoA etc release will not work.

To configure Gaffer to use Arnold, the ARNOLD_ROOT environment variable must point to the root directory of the Arnold release to use. See the Gaffer documentation for more information.

3Delight

To configure Gaffer to use 3Delight, the DELIGHT environment variable must point to the root directory of the 3Delight release to use. See the Gaffer documentation for more information.

Running Gaffer

GUI Mode

Gaffer is launched via a wrapper script found in the bin directory, this wrapper is named gaffer on Linux and gaffer.cmd on Windows

Linux

/opt/gaffer-1.5.11.0-linux-gcc11/bin/gaffer

Windows

C:/software/gaffer-1.5.11.0-windows/bin/gaffer.cmd

Command line execution

Gaffer scripts can be executed on the command line via the execute app, or dispatched locally or to a render farm via the dispatch app.

Additional utilities

A Gaffer release includes a number of additional utility applications in the bin directory, such as usdview, oiiotool and abcecho. These tools can be run via the env app.

/opt/gaffer-1.5.11.0-linux-gcc11/bin/gaffer env usdview /path/to/file.usda

/opt/gaffer-1.5.11.0-linux-gcc11/bin/gaffer env oiiotool /path/to/image.exr

/opt/gaffer-1.5.11.0-linux-gcc11/bin/gaffer env abcecho /path/to/file.abc