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AWSF TAC Meeting - January 16, 2019

Voting member attendance

  • Daniel Heckenberg - Chairperson, Animal Logic Pty Ltd
  • Gordon Bradley, Autodesk
  • Mark McGuire, Blue Sky Studios, Inc.
  • Kerry in place of Michael O’Gorman, Cisco Systems Inc.
  • Henry Vera, Double Negative
  • Bill Ballew, DreamWorks Animation
  • Matt Kuhlenschmidt, Epic Games, Inc.
  • Brian Cipriano, Google
  • Jim Jeffers, Intel Corporation
  • Larry Gritz, Sony Pictures Imageworks
  • Jean-Francois Panisset, VES Technology Committee
  • Cory Omand, The Walt Disney Studios
  • Kimball Thurston, Weta Digital Limited
  • Ken Museth, Weta, OpenVDB Representative

Apologies

Gordon Bradley, Autodesk

Agenda

  • Goals for TAC: Year 1
    • 6 projects adopted
    • CI infrastructure
      • VFX Reference Platform based dependencies
      • Builds for DCC plugins
      • Testing
      • Static analysis to assist CII badge criteria
    • Stretch goals:
      • Downloadable and installable artefacts
      • Windows, Mac support (currently most work done on Linux)
      • Should GPU support be added as an explicit stretch goals (vexxhost OpenStack hosting provider now has GPU instances available). May be driven by OpenColorIO upcoming project.
  • LA ASWF Meeting: 7 Feb 2019
    • Agenda
      • TAC update
      • Project updates: presenters for each project (OpenVDB, OpenEXR, OpenColorIO)
      • Presentations ideally in person, but teleconferencing will be available
      • TAC-related items are mostly 13:00-15:00 PST (lunch at 12:00).
      • Questions to Daniel Heckenberg or David Morin
      • Take stock of where we are and plan for goals until SIGGRAPH 2019
      • Tentative face to face TAC meeting after end of official agenda, proposing 16:00 at same location, AMPAS headquarters, teleconferencing available. May cause shuffling of TAC / CI meeting cadence, will impact some members in other timezones.
  • Technical Project updates
    • OpenVDB
      • Updates from Ken
      • High cadence of meetings before end of 2018 (4 or 5 meetings per week), very productive
      • Release of version 6.0, mostly compliant with VFX Reference Platform
      • Some API changes, hence new major version number.
      • Next release may be 6.0.1 or 6.1, TBD
      • Major contribution from DNeg, JIT language compilation (presented a DigiPro 2018)
      • Contacts with Autodesk, key developers at BiFrost: would OpenVDB be interested in adopting multi-resolution data structure they developed. Feedback to Autodesk, waiting for their answers to questions.
      • Seems very interesting, not completely clear if this would mean replacing the current data structure completely (unlikely) or extending it.
      • Close contacts with Intel, they would like to join the meetings, they might have specific contributions to make. Jim: lots of work in multi-resolution volume rendering done at Intel, they would like their OSPRay codebase to support OpenVDB, and look at contributions that could be made to OpenVDB.
      • NVIDIA is worlking on GVDB, potential for collaboration.
      • Discussing putting together a SIGGRAPH course for 2019.
      • Things are going well, no blocking issues, a large backlog of new things coming.
      • Daniel: is OpenVDB considering using the foundation CI instead of current TravisCI, and question about changing license reference style and copyright notices. Ken: topics are still under debate, they have a meeting tomorrow, so may have more to say at next meeting.
  • OpenColorIO application review
    • Proposal
    • Charter, DCO, CLAs
    • Governance
    • Contribution
    • License (3 clause BSD)
    • Larry: links above point to final documents, minimal changes from the OpenVDB project. Keeping BSD 3-clause license, governing documents in the repo for the last few weeks. They are ready to go.
    • Vote for adoption (incubation stage)
      • Kimball makes the proposal
      • Dreamworks seconds
      • No opposing votes, no abstains, so unanimous with quorum
      • Project is accepted to become official ASWF project
      • Will take offline discussion of details of how to make the official transition
      • OpenVDB can help with the process
  • CI updates
    • Working group
      • Progress on goal of integrating VFX Reference Platform dependencies into the build / CI system. Some full stack Reference Platform compliant builds accomplished.
      • Discussion on using conan.io as a way to manage cross package depencies and manage build environment. Attempts to be the C/C++ equivalent of package managers for other languages such as npm.
    • Static analysis for CII badge
      • What approach is most suitable, especially to try to attain CII badge level.
      • Partly due to lack of more sophisticated tools, current “best practices” are not that difficult to follow. Running clang-tidy with a few disabled checks, lgtm (commercial tool) allows free scans of OSS projects look promising to achieve CII badge.
      • OpenVDB has looked at more sophisticated tooling and may be able to offer insight (Vericode?).
      • CII badge requirements are somewhat vague (by design), mainly you sign up to fix medium to high priority security issues that have been reported. Mostly about adhering to coding best practices.
      • John from LF mentioned the requirement to identify a security expert within the project, which can be challenging. Could it be solved across all projects?
      • Larry: no formal requirements listed for the “security expert”, is a competent senior software developer sufficient for this role? Is MPAA / TPN familiarity relevant?
      • Security is important when exchanging data between studios, which is most of what the initial OSS projects concentrate on.
      • Should we try to reach out to external experts?
      • Larry: are there resources within the LF?
    • Follow up: Action item from OpenVDB: Nexus IQ scans (LF)
    • Follow up: Check with Linux Foundation about security expertise
    • Follow up: Check with Linux Foundation on specifics of designated security expert for each project
    • Follow up: SideFX Houdini API for CI usage. EULA evaluation. (LF)
  • Update on candidate projects
    • OpenEXR
      • Corey: no specific updates at this point.
      • Carey Philips: winding its way through the process, should be nearing completion
      • Update from Francois Chardavoine: confident it would be ready to propose adoption at some time in February. Last outstanding issues related to trademark and assignment.
    • CMakeTools
    • Others?
      • We need 3 additional projects to meet our goal of 6 active projects by SIGGRAPH
      • Kimball has been working on CMakeTools project: will pick up work after the holiday break. Goal is to have common Cmake infrastructure to be shared between project. Currently using OpenVDB, OpenColorIO and OpenEXR as a testbed.
      • Larry will have another project to propose by next TAC meeting, too early to say which but feels he has a good candidate.
      • Daniel: AL has been discussing with Autodesk how to share work on MayaUSD plugin (currently independent of USD projects), could be a ASWF project. Bringing in USD as a CI dependency brings in another dozen dependent projects.
      • Daniel: is “environment management” a suitable project? For instance the Rez project? Discussed with main author, won’t happen in short term but could be possible. Dependency management has been tackled by every studio, is there room for a “general” solution.
      • Larry: interested in collaborating on this problem to avoid every studio having to solve that problem on their own.
      • Carey Philips: looking for specific success stories for ASWF so far. Asking of Ken from OpenVDB: what would you suggest are specific achievements due to the foundation? Ken: before Foundation, OpenVDB was run by one person at Dreamworks, who was overwhelmed. Foundation of governance structure brought contributions from several studios that Dreamworks had not heard of before. Have been approached by commercial partners (Autodesk, Intel, nVidia) more than before. OpenVDB seems to have entered a “new phase”, developers are energized, a very positive experience. Good to hear that actual code has been written and released, not just organizational. WETA’s appetite to contribute to projects has increased because of it.
      • Larry: what happens if multiple projects from a company are ASWF projects, does each one has to have a separate TAC representative? Should something like the CMake project be a “full scale” project? Maybe we need to define different “levels” of projects. Should follow up with Linux Foundation.

Action Items (AIs)

  • Ken Museth: Feedback from OpenVDB on ongoing adoption-related work.
  • Linux Foundation: From OpenVDB: Nexus IQ scans
  • Linux Foundation: SideFX Houdini API for CI usage. EULA evaluation.
  • Linux Foundation: (CII Badge) LF as source of security expertise?
  • Linux Foundation: (CII Badge) Specifics of designated security expert for each project

Notes

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