What's with Gaffer Anyway?

Admit it, you’ve heard about Gaffer and you to tried it, but your first impression was somewhere along the lines of

… But why?!

Your second attempt improved your perception, and your assessment was upgraded to …

… But it doesn’t have modelling tool, rigging, character animation or FX!!! Why?!

But Gaffer wasn’t going away so you muster your energy and give it one more go, this time you really put the effort to follow YouTube videos that felt like a dubstep version of an actual course, but you’ve persevered, you’ve put in the hours. And now you have a much better understanding and appreciation for what Gaffer is, so your assessment is along the line of:

… But this going to make me slower! I can literally do this much faster in Blender (put any DCC here really)!!!

Yes, you are not alone. And yes! it is completely normal to have these thoughts and impressions about Gaffer. Before I tell you what Gaffer is I’ll answer your burning question, is Gaffer good for your work or career? The short answer is Yes! It is very much an invaluable tool in your arsenal, and yes, you should start using it for all your projects.

What is Gaffer?

Gaffer is an open-source scene assembly, lookdev, lighting and VFX application developed by Image Engine Design Inc. Out of the box Gaffer supports Cycles render engine in full. So, anything that can be done with Cycles in Blender can be achieved with Cycles in Gaffer. Gaffer also supports 3Delight render engine, you have to have it installed first to use it. Gaffer also supports Autodesk Arnold and Pixar RenderMan. If you have these two installed, you are ready to go.

The Arnold integration is first-class citizen in. Meaning it has been used and tested in numerous feature films and VFX projects, it fully supports everything that Gaffer offers. RenderMan Is becoming first-class as well, so for 95% of users they won’t notice any difference.

As for Cycles and 3Delight, they are supported but depending on your VFX use you might find some kinks that requires reporting to be addressed in future releases.

Gaffer is free to use and artists have full access to the source code under the BSD-3 License. The Gaffer community is one of the best honestly, it is based on Discord, and this is where the actual developers and maintainers of Gaffer lurk as well, so often Artists get feedback, responses and even bug fixes directly from the developers.

Now, the is the politically correct version of what Gaffer is. I’m sure you already read that somewhere. What does it really mean for Indie artists though and much smaller teams?

What is Gaffer really!

Let me try to explain what Gaffer by using an example. You must have heard or used Adobe Illustrator before, right?

The Metaphor

Illustrator It is a fantastic software for all things vector illustration and has been around for ages. One can design anything in Illustrator. From icons all the way to large scale posters and even book covers and comics as well. But Adobe has another product named In-Design. And for those who don’t know what In-Design is, it is a vector software as well. So, what is the difference? Why does Adobe maintain two vector illustration software? And why do some artists favors Illustrator over In-Design? Or the other way around?

It helps to understand the problem first to that In-Design is trying to resolve, which kind of gives some clue of why Gaffer exists.

So, the problem that In-Design is trying to solve is scale. It is not trying to solve vector illustration. We already have Illustrator for that, but what illustrators’ lacks is a vector illustration tool at scale.

What do I mean by at scale? Take the case of an artist designing a magazine. Illustrator is more than capable of designing all the pages. The problem with illustrator though it doesn’t have the concept of pages for starters. Illustrator work in layers and layers only. There is Artwork, but the layers are shared between artworks, and more importantly you cannot easily move things around and do ordering or "pages" if you we were designing them in Illustrator. Also, add 20 or more of these Artboard and illustrator will crawl to a halt. So, organizing pages is extremely difficult and almost impossible if you want to have 100 pages or more. In-Design have layers but also have the concept of pages at its core instead of layers. You can create a master page template for many types of pages, move them around, lay them side by side, do anything you want with those pages, and do more than a 100 pages, it’s all good.

The second thing Illustrator cannot do is type based rules. If I have 10 Artboard in illustrator and I want to change all the headers to a specific font then I must change the headers one by one in every artboard. Same goes for paragraphs, bullet points and quotes. Text in Illustrator is just that, text! It doesn’t have a role or a purpose, as such you cannot tell Illustrator to change all headers to these properties. However, In-Design text and paragraph styles are easily defined, and any text you write can be assigned to any of these styles. So, changing the style will change all associated texts across many pages.

A third thing Illustrator cannot do is text flowing from one page to another. If I add more content to a text container, the text overflow will be cut. It will not flow to the other container. So changing text content over many pages or Artboards is a very laborious task. With In-Design text can flow freely between pages, even if it was flowing around shapes or images.

In the other hand In-Design doesn’t have a powerful, or meaningful vector tools. It does have some vector tools but none that rivals those found in Illustrator. Also, it doesn’t have basic image editing tools either, which Illustrator have!

So, Illustrator have all the tools that assist in advanced vector artwork creations but doesn’t have any meaningful tool for vector illustration at scale. And In-Design have all the tools for vector illustration at scale but nothing of the meaningful tools for vector illustration.

Let’s bring this back to Gaffer.

The Point ... Gaffer!

Gaffer is a VFX application that provides nodes and workflow concepts which allows artists and team to do look development (i.e. Lookdev) for one or more objects at scale. Meaning, an artist doesn't need to have separate projects for each object lookdev. All objects pertaining to the scene, scenes, shots or an entire feature can be live together under a single project file and still have the ability to lookdev each object separately but within context and by using shared nodes.

Also, Gaffer allows artists to light scenes, shots or shows with ease and at scale (There goes that word again, scale! I'll explain what it means in the next section). So along with being able to have all the shots in a single script (a script is the name given to the project file that is saved to disk which contains all the work done in Gaffer) Gaffer provides powerful workflow concepts to handle variations in camera, lighting and shading management in each shot without the need to reuse nodes or the dreadful shot_6_final_revision_17_final_5_i_hate_this_job_temp_6_wip.gfr file naming.

This also gives away that Gaffer is a scene assembly as well. An artist or a team export all of their assets, animations and FX from any DCC and import into Gaffer for lookdev, lighting and rendering. Gaffer can be used for instancing of assets to achieve any complex shot that requires thousands if not millions of instances.

In a very broad nutshell, that is what Gaffer is 👀 Was that a better description of Gaffer? No! .... mmmm

Alright! I'll explain the details with examples to get the point across.

Why Gaffer?

So, Gaffer doesn't have any modeling tools, no sophisticated animation tools, beyond a basic animation tools. No Character animation or rigging capabilities and No dynamics or FX tools. But the shading capabilities, scene assembly and lighting tools and workflow specific nodes are the things that make Gaffer appealing for many Artists. What are these capabilities.

1- Speed:

Gaffer is lightweight. In the world of 3D, lightweight means fast to load, fast to process and fast to iterate. When I load Maya on my machine for instance, I’m loading everything, from rigging, shading, lighting tools, animation tools, Bifrost, dynamics, plugins, render engines ... etc. Maya loads in 2min and 39 second on my machine! that is Maya 2026 with the 3 render engines and a handful of plugins. And when Maya loads in full it consumes 4.370 GB of my system memory. This is Maya with an empty scene (not even a default box in the scene) just Maya in an idle state twiddling its thumbs.

On the other hand, Gaffer, with 4 render engines, loads fully in 6 seconds with only 670 MB of system memory. For the artist this translate to faster scene loading, faster iterations, faster operations, faster system responses, and more room to work on larger scenes before exhausting the system resources.

Is it unfair to compare Gaffer, which has no modelling, character animation, or dynamics tools, to Maya and point out that its footprint is much smaller? Yes—and that is exactly the point. Because Gaffer has far less overhead to manage, such as IK, skinning, dynamics, and dependency graphs, it responds faster and translates scenes to the render engine much more quickly. For artists working on look development or lighting, iteration time is critical; every few seconds saved means more time spent experimenting and refining. So, when you compare Gaffer with your preferred DCC, imagine your favourite DCC as Howl’s Moving Castle lumbering across a meadow, and Gaffer as an eagle soaring through the sky. Too clichéd? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here is a practical example of Gaffer being light weight have saved me in a recent project. The project is a recreation of the San Gimignano artwork by the Architect Mark Poulier done in 3D.

The scene was simple, with models made from plane objects. I was modelling and developing the look at the same time in Maya. My plan was straightforward: create a base shader and look for all objects, then duplicate the shader graph for any objects that needed changes. It seemed simple, but as the project progressed, Maya and RenderMan became increasingly sluggish. I had to stop IPR several times to avoid crashing Maya, which meant tweaking blindly before running another IPR preview.

Now, if you have ever worked in Maya, you would know that Maya shader duplication have issues. So, when I started having odd behaviour with my duplicated shading graphs I attributed to something happening in the background. For example, modifying the UV tiling of a duplicated shader graph would change the UV tiling for several other materials! It was amazing really. But eventually I got through and sent the artwork to be displayed at the Pixar RenderMan booth and Art & Science fair in SIGGRAPH 2026. in the back of my mind, I attributed this oddness to shared dependency graph between nodes in Maya.

After submitting it, I realised I had forgotten to model a rooftop in the lower-right corner. It seemed like an easy fix: duplicate an object, duplicate the shading, and render again. But the new render had incorrect UVs, and some materials even lost their light response curves, putting the result far from what I wanted. I deleted the new object and rendered again, but the problem remained. And no, I had not saved versions of the WIP_FINAL file, this was the WIP_FINAL file!