gaffer-macos

Unofficial Gaffer builds for Apple Silicon Macs, with Cycles. GafferHQ only ships Linux and Windows builds, so this repo has a script that downloads the Gaffer source, patches it for macOS and builds it.

I'm just a hobby Gaffer user and haven't done anything serious with it. I wanted Gaffer on my Mac, and I'd like Mac users to be able to get the latest version. Everything here is vibecoded. It builds and renders, but I haven't reviewed the patches in depth, so no guarantees.

If something breaks, open an issue or message me on the Gaffer Discord. I'm happy to fix bugs.

Download

mkdir -p ~/gaffer
curl -L https://github.com/vitusli/gaffer-macos/releases/download/v1.7.5.0/gaffer-1.7.5.0-macos-arm64.tar.gz | tar xz -C ~/gaffer
~/gaffer/build-1.7.5.0/bin/gaffer

If you download from the Releases page in the browser instead, macOS will block every .dylib because the build isn't signed. Fix that after extracting with xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/gaffer/build-1.7.5.0.

GPU rendering (Metal)

Cycles can render on the GPU via Metal, but it's not the default:

• Viewer: switch the Cycles device dropdown from CPU to Metal.
• Final renders: in CyclesOptions set Device to Metal and Shading System to SVM. Metal doesn't support OSL, and Gaffer defaults to OSL, so otherwise Cycles silently falls back to CPU (only a warning in the log).

Known issues

• OSL shaders only render on the CPU (Cycles limitation, same on other platforms).
• The mouse cursor doesn't change shape (e.g. resize arrows). This is a side effect of a workaround for a crash on macOS 15+.

Build from source

Needs an Apple Silicon Mac, Xcode command line tools, Homebrew and ~10 GB of disk. The script installs scons and inkscape via Homebrew.

git clone https://github.com/vitusli/gaffer-macos.git
cd gaffer-macos
make build   # ~30 min
make run

make build TAG=latest builds the newest GafferHQ release. Untested versions may fail, but the script tells you which patch broke.

Using a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, ...)? Point it at this repo and ask it to install or build Gaffer for you; AGENTS.md tells it how.

Gaffer's Discord helped a lot with this.

Not affiliated with GafferHQ. BSD 3-Clause, like Gaffer.