ASWF TAC Meeting - July 29, 2020

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

  • Daniel Heckenberg - Chairperson, Animal Logic Pty Ltd
  • Gordon Bradley, Autodesk
  • Pilar Molina Lopez, Blue Sky Studios, Inc.
  • Michael O’Gorman, Cisco Systems Inc.
  • Henry Vera, DNEG
  • Bill Ballew, DreamWorks Animation
  • Matt Kuhlenschmidt, Epic Games, Inc.
  • Brian Cipriano, Google & OpenCue Representative
  • Sean C McDuffee, Intel Corporation
  • Larry Gritz, Sony Pictures Imageworks
  • Jean-Francois Panisset, VES Technology Committee
  • Cory Omand, The Walt Disney Studios
  • Kimball Thurston, Weta Digital Limited
  • Eric Enderton, NVIDIA
  • Sean Looper, Amazon Web Services
  • Michael Min, Netflix
  • Michael B. Johnson, Apple
  • Dave Fellows, Microsoft
  • Sean O’Connell, Advanced Micro Devices
  • Ken Museth, OpenVDB Representative
  • Michael Dolan, OpenColorIO Representative
  • Cary Phillips, OpenEXR Representative
  • Joshua Minor, OpenTimelineIO Representative
  • Chris Kulla, Open Shading Language Representative

Other Attendees

  • John Mertic, Linux Foundation
  • Emily Olin, Linux Foundation
  • JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
  • Ashley Whetter, Python 3 Working Group / DNeg
  • Nick Porcino, Pixar
  • Greg Denton, Microsoft Azure
  • Andrew Grimberg, Linux Foundation
  • Andrew Briar, WB
  • Carol Payne, Netflix, Diversity+Inclusion WG
  • Doug Walker, OCIO / Autodesk
  • Alex Meddick, Rising Sun Pictures

Apologies

  • Michael Dolan, OpenColorIO

Agenda

  • Goals for TAC: Year 2

  • Conference update

    • Open Source days scheduled almost finalized

    • Reaching out to speakers with logistics

    • Will be using Zoom, can have more than 3 presenters per project

    • Still need length of session for CI working group, who will talk. Daniel: how long are other sessions? Emily: 25 or 55 minutes, D&I will be 55 minutes since includes a panel, other groups are 25 or 55. Daniel: will depend on how deep into the details we want to go, but 25 minutes is likely sufficient. Emily: Python3 group doesn’t have enough content, but could include an update in the CI session? For SIGGRAPH, submitting a ASWF overview, and a BoF as a “whirlwind tour” of ASWF project, 10 minute update from each project.

    • Also does USD working group want to present, reached out to Cory

    • Can make many different presenters, so easier to include as presenter people who are likely to answer questions during Q&A session, easier to do up front rather than switch from attendee to presenter during Q&A.

    • Linux Foundation events team and Emily / John will be on during sessions to help. Each Zoom session will have its own link but same password.

    • Open Source Days registration site is up

    • Registration will be required, email will go out with a password a day or two before the event.

    • Graphics will be provided so anyone else wants to “advertize” the event

  • Working Groups

    • CI

      • Daniel: focussing on marching forward with GPU / CI setup using AWS CodeBuilder, moving along, Michael Dolan can update.

      • Also started to go deeper into Mac platform support, Wave put us in touch with Marshall Elfstrand from Apple Developer Relations team who will contribute going forward.

      • Doug Walker: progress on GPU CI is going forward. Andy: logs are now working, being forwarded from AWS CodeBuilder back to GHA. Still getting a failure saying there’s no “head attached” to the builder. Looks like the correct NVIDIA drivers may not be installed? https://jira.linuxfoundation.org/projects/IT/queues/custom/18/IT-19573 Sean Looper can help find the right person at AWS if we need help.

    • Diversity & Inclusion

      • Carol: update is short. Met with ASWF Board to present an update, slides + survey that happened a month or so ago, and first draft of goals and deliverables. Next meeting planned for Open Source Days, second draft of charter for the group.

      • Emily: will have a session at Open Source Days, and other events planned as well.

      • Brief showing of the slides

      • Survey Results: many respondents from several studios (30 responses).

      • Asking about familiarity with open source, what age group / experience level should be targeted (college & university age was majority response)

      • Asking about what programs would have most impact: mentorships and partnerships with other organizations

      • Draft goals: encourage high school and college students to pursue career in or participate in open source projects, ensure ASWF has diverse leadership and membership, provide guidance and resource to ASWF members

      • Student education is an external goal: develop a mentorship program

      • Diversity in ASWF: work with TAC and Board to establish internal D&I goals, work with ASWF projects to in place a D&I ambassador to ensure projects are inviting to newcomers of all backgrounds

      • Guidance to member: blog posts on D&I for members, gather D&I resources for members

      • Poll: looking for ideas on how to target universities

      • Poll: looking for ideas on partner organizations

      • Would like to develop a model for these programs that could be repeatable across other universities and organizations

      • Should also target universities / organizations with which we have established, personal relationships

    • Python 3

      • Ashley: good meeting this week. How to get people more motivated about the transition. The need to transition to Python 3 is often seen as a chore, so coming up with a list of pros and cons to help convince studios that it is a good idea.

      • Will start thinking about how the VFX industry will connect more with the Python community. We have custom solutions which may be better served by general purpose solutions from the greater community. Daniel: packaging and distribution approaches, or anything else? Ashley: best practices, using PyLint, Black for formatting. Got in contact with The Foundry, may get some representation from them, and hoping to get someone from SideFX. Martin from Autodesk has been attending, which has been very helpful.

    • USD

      • The is now a Wiki on Confluence, richer experience and easier to make contribution. https://wiki.aswf.io/display/WGUSD/USD+Working+Group

      • Working Group meeting mostly covered the Wiki, some issues with ID management. Meeting notes are going to the Wiki, they aren’t in the repo.

      • Daniel: Cory and others have done a good job of scoping out the broad structure and the kind of information to be captured. Setting up goals and non goals has been a good mechanism.

      • No answer right now about USD WG and Open Source days.

  • Technical Project updates

    • Website and documentation updates is a common topic across projects

    • Doug: OpenColorIO is busy on revamping the website and documentation as approaching SIGGRAPH.This SIGGRAPH is “feature complete” milestone for V2, preparing DigiPro presentation on August 12th. Overhaul documentation system, new logo, lots in progress.

    • Cary: OpenEXR making progress on web site. Asked whether best to keep project source in main repo or separate repo. Ended up preferring a separate repo to hide the chatter from the website update. Also get the whole website source when you clone the repo if only a single repo. Will lift content from existing site into new site, should be online soon. Sarah Martin at ILM has been helping, taking the documentation that was written in OpenOffice years ago and available in PDF format, and converting it to an online format, which should make it easier to access. Target is Open Source Days. Also have a new logo. New Logo

    • Cary: new repo with separate imath seems to be working. Building OpenEXR against the new library is forcing a large reorganization / modernization. Retiring the “ILM” name from the library, will be called “openexr” rather than “ilmimf”. Long overdue cleaning up of the code structure. Now working on CMake / CI infrastructure to build and deal with the new dependency on the iMath repo.

    • Larry: some of the modernization is also in progress such as putting const_expr in the right places.

    • Cary: compatibility with the CUDA “half” type is also done.

    • John: LF has an internal team that can help with logo redesigns. OpenEXR did 3 iterations with LF graphic designers.

    • John: a number of the project TSCs have discussed a shift over to the Apache CLA, a plurality of these projects are looking to make the shift in the short or mid term. Still owe the exact wording of what will come in the EasyCLA system, waiting for this for OpenTimelineIO and OpenShadingLanguage, which will help to make over the graduation hump.

    • John: will submit a PR against the tac repo to update the sample CLAs (currently LF short form). JF will submit an issue against the repo.

    • Chris: OSL just waiting for final copy of CLA, hopefully can be fast tracked through legal and move forward. Last thing OSL is waiting for.

    • USD working group: JT has been working on Jupyter workbooks, will add intro and advanced documents, could be moved to a Wiki or repo. Could be leveraged across all ASWF projects. Daniel: moving towards a modern style of documentation, “learning as you are doing”. JT: Jupyter notebooks allow running code, interspaced with text documentation. Netflix did a good blog post on how they are using it.

    • Eric: TAC meeting in 2 weeks is coincident with ASWF talk at Digipro, would it be possible to move the. Daniel: waiting for Open Source Days schedule as well, which may require moving some WG meeting dates. Daniel: we can move TAC meeting, easiest way to go.

  • Update on candidate projects

  • Next meeting

    • 12 August 2020

Action Items (AIs)

Notes

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