Hmm how do you get around that whitespace check for ArnoldImagerUI.py I wonder, as it has 2 spaces as well

Following gaffer-dev I am well aware that this wasn't a priority due to Gaffer being the procedural itself

Sorry Alex, but I'd go a bit further and say that we're a little opposed to Arnold operators philosophically, rather than them just not just being a priority. Putting it a bit bluntly, I see operators-in-the-renderer as a crutch for certain other DCCs with more limited procedural capabilities than Gaffer. Instead of putting effort into supporting them, I would much rather put the effort into further enhancing Gaffer's procedural capabilities to the benefit of all our renderers.

While it's true that you've already done the work, a portion of the maintenance will inevitably fall on the core team, and I'd rather not accept that burden for a feature that we don't feel positive about. It's unfortunate that the feature requires changes to the core renderer backend as otherwise I would suggest hosting this as a Gaffer extension. One potential compromise might be figuring out the absolute minimum of core changes needed to allow you to do so, but at first glance that does seem to be a fair majority of the PR, so might represent an almost identical amount of support. In the future I'd suggest discussing initiatives of this magnitude up front - I hate pushing back on something after you've put the effort in already.

On a brighter note, I'd certainly be interested in learning more about your custom operator though, and putting some thought into how it might be implemented as a Gaffer feature (or a combination of features). We definitely want to push Gaffer more in the direction of procedural content creation, rather than mere assembly, so any thoughts you have along those lines would be very welcome. Thanks also for the fix to the Imagers menu - I've cherry-picked that over for the next 1.4 release already.

I'll leave this PR open for a few days to leave room for further discussion, but otherwise I'm afraid my intention is to close it...

Hi John yep no worries I am in agreement on this one in general. I was having a chat with @murraystevenson already on a few things I can try, this was more for a 1:1 match of something already written but ultimately I am after a more generic approach that can work with all renderers.

I'll look into sharing what kind of operators I've written, which certainly can become actual Gaffer procedural nodes as an alternative approach - I think one of them might be tricky to implement.

Cheers

Hi John yep no worries I am in agreement on this one in general.

OK great, thanks for your understanding. I'll close this one then, and look forward to chatting about potentially more generic approaches...