Sunsetting GafferAppleseed

[John Haddon]

Hi folks,

We've always felt that as an open source package, it's important that Gaffer should ship with a quality open source renderer out-of-the-box. Since 2014, this facility has been provided admirably by Appleseed, with an integration contributed by Esteban Tovagliari.

Over recent years though, the Appleseed team appear to have moved on to new adventures, with no updates since Appleseed 2.1.0-beta in 2019. Maintaining the integration is becoming increasingly difficult for us as compilers and dependency versions move on, so our intention is to remove Appleseed support in Gaffer `1.3.0.0`. We'll continue to ship with an open source renderer out-of-the-box, but now in the form of Cycles (where we have the opposite problem, keeping up with it's rapid development!).

Many thanks to Esteban and the entire Appleseed team for all their contributions and for playing such an important role in Gaffer's journey to this point...

Cheers...

John