ASWF TAC Meeting - April 21, 2021

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

John Mertic, Linux Foundation
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Mathieu Mazerolle, Foundry
Rachel Rose, ILM, ASWF D&I WG
Patrick Hodoul, Autodesk / OCIO
Nick Porcino, Pixar
Ashley Whetter, Python 3 WG
Jonathan Stone, MaterialX
Scott Wilson, Rust WG
Alex Meddick, Rising Sun Pictures
Carol Payne, Netflix, ASWF D&I WG
Sergio Rojas, Arena World

Apologies

Cary Phillips, OpenEXR, represented by Kimball Thurston
Michael Dolan, OCIO, represented by Patrick Hodoul

Agenda

Asset WG vote results
- Congratulations, the vote passed, now an official WG
- “League of Lawyers” meet on Friday
- Legal committee meetings: intention is to have reps from governing board + legal counsel
- Joshua: Netflix has Netflix Open Content - we asked for clarification on which licenses are used, Netflix volunteered to change to most permissive creative commons license (CC BY), very helpful and generous, thank you! Very helpful for OTIO
Open Source Days - 2 questions (John)
- Summer conference, targeted towards practitioners in the industry
- Announced Aug 11-12, overlap with parts of SIGGRAPH, both are virtual. Is this a big issue / red flag?
- Wave: yes, this is an issue. SIGGRAPH will likely get higher priority. Carol: don’t want to have people have to choose, they will choose SIGGRAPH. First one we did was onsite at SIGGRAPH but that was in person. Last year we did it shortly after (before?) virtual SIGGRAPH. This year was penciled in Aug 11-12 but now overlaps. Rachel: Emily mentioned that last year it was before SIGGRAPH, felt that a presentation at SIGGRAPH could have brought more people to Open Source Days. So would be good to try to have it after SIGGRAPH so our SIGGRAPH presentations could bring people to our event. Larry: maybe issue with people being “zoomed out” after SIGGRAPH.
- Daniel: virtual conferences tend to not engage people in the same way as in person ones, so people tend to juggle commitments with work commitments. So work + SIGGRAPH + ASWF commitments would be hard to juggle.
- John: so feedback is that yes, this is a red flag to Governing Board next week, and hopefully we can get an updated plan.
- John: 2nd Question. Typically the event has been an “invited speaker” event, this year we are toying with idea to have a “call for papers” to outside the main projects, would this be an opportunity to pull in talks we might not normally hear from. Wave: too much overlap with Pipeline Conference + DigiPro? Larry: we started this exercise as gathering the BoFs for these projects, often we would put out the word in community for anyone interested in speaking at the BoF. So many are already incorporating “invited speakers”. Kimball: we had Blender, other groups come in previously, that was quite successful even though not ASWF projects. Larry: we do have more projects now. John: some plans for some USD related presentations, but we don’t have space for 50 talks, likely more 6-8 talks. So should we put out a “call for papers” or do we already know who we want to talk to. Scott: for instance for the Rust WG, planning to present at DigiPro, could also present at Open Source Days? John: of course. Larry: can’t do the same talk as DigiPro, since that’s a refereed event.
- Wave: since everything is recorded, can always point people to that.
- Daniel: WGs are often discussion focussed, so that’s a good place for discussion focussed content.
- Patrick: we still want the existing projects to have enough time to present all they have to present (OCIO ran short on time last year)
Jonathan Stone: MaterialX proposal
- Project Contribution Proposal
- Requested project maturity level: incubation
- Don’t yet have a CII badge, but close to meeting those criteria, need to add static code analysis to the GitHub Actions test suite (across platforms and wide variations of platforms, but currently only runs build and test)
- Open Standard to represent materials in content pipelines. Closely aligned with OSL, OCIO and ACES. Planning to add OSL closures in MaterialX.
- USDView / Hydra Storm supports MaterialX (collaboration between LucasFilm and Pixar)
- Modified Apache 2 license, same license for all new open source projects at Disney.
- Hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/materialx/MaterialX
- No mandated external dependencies such as Boost, TBB. NanoGUI is optional dependency (for MaterialX viewer).
- Full list of contributors in the contributors document in the repo, many companies have contributed so far (Sony for reference OSL definitions for OSL nodes, Autodesk for code generation and original definitions of physically based shading nodes, NVIDIA for MDL code generator, collaboration with Autodesk).
- Discussion forum on Google Groups
- Issue tracking is handled through GitHub repo.
- https://materialx.org
- Releases approximately every 3 months, 16 current releases
- MaterialX is an unregistered trademark of LucasFilm
- No code in MaterialX depends on commercial tools, so CI test suite only tests its own code, but for instance the Arnold code generator tests are run by Autodesk. Daniel: does test suite include many cross platform / GPU based tests? What are the requirements? Jonathan: MaterialX tests on Windows/Linux/macoS, multiple variants, including most recent and oldest supported compilers (nothing before C++ 11). Added GPU tests in last year, it’s somewhat challenging to do GPU tests in GitHub Actions, doing it with virtual frame buffers, currently doing GPU tests on Linux, hoping to extend to macOS and WIndows in the future, but only Linux tests are run automatically. Daniel: have always admired ambition of MaterialX, it is addressing important challenges.
- Kimball: do we see any issues with adoption? Should we go ahead and vote? JF: moves to motion, Wave: seconds.
- Are we at quorum? John: yes. All in favor, no opposes, no abstain. Welcome MaterialX to ASWF!
OpenCue revue
- https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Lh4vOz9WMWCq3y4JayD4H9Neqf-w_78laNobOdzB8uo/
- Past Year
  - Completed user survey
  - Improved Windows support
  - Improved GPU support
  - Removed legacy code (Oracle DB support)
  - GUI fixes and features (GUI for creating new shows)
  - Code coverage 30% -> 55%
  - Metric dashboard with Prometheus / Grafana
  - Lots of bugs fixes and improvements
    - 185 PRs merged in last year
- Year to come
  - New user UX
    - Python installation via pip
    - Improved sandbox setup
  - Docs refresh
    - Component user guides
    - API reference
    - Configuration guide
  - Tutorial docs to highlight new / existing features
    - Eg Grafana dashboards
    - Help attract new users, can’t just rely on ChangeLog
- Committers
  - “Demonstrate having a healthy number of committers from a diverse contributor base”
    - 7 committers from 5 different orgs
    - 10 TSC members, many of whom are also committers
    - Representation from studios, cloud providers, active users
    - Active process to promote active contributors to committers, and committers to TSC
- Contributions
  - Over the past year, 228 commits, rate of change is pretty good, changes keep coming but not too quickly
- CII badge
  - CII badge has 100% of passing criteria
  - Test coverage >50% but goal is to reach 80% this year
- Key Documents
  - Committers, Charter
- TAC
  - Technical leads, license scan
- ASWF Value
  - “Be deemed by the TAC to add value to the mission of ASWF”
  - Project is relatively new vs other ASWF projects
  - End-user application
  - Multi-component networked system
  - Java/Python
  - Collaborative environment for studios and cloud providers
  - Have been able to use the same CI as other projects, so our systems can support a wide range of projects, such as end user applications.
- Adoption (now)
  - Project survey results
  - Do you regularly use OpenCue
    - 16 studios using OpenCue, a good result given the impact of adopting a new render queue system
    - Wide range of sizes of deployments, from single digit to 5 digit number of render nodes
  - Why aren’t you using OpenCue?
    - Lack of features wasn’t a big issue (11%), helped to inform where to focus at TSC level
    - 50% are already using something else (well established area in the industry)
    - Focus on tutorials and docs
- Adoption (Future)
  - Goals for 2021
    - New use UX improvements
      - Better sandbox experience
      - Fixes for common setup issues
    - Docs refresh
      - User guides
      - Configuration Guides
      - API reference
      - Python examples
  - Main work may be marketing, not technical
- Graduation proposal was also submitted to the TAC mailing list as a proposal
- Eric: “lack of Windows support”, “never heard of it” were listed as “why are you not using it”? Brian: surprising that folks responding to ASWF survey didn’t know about it. Windows question also highlighted new work, since Windows support was not available at first but got added, so need to do more to point out new features.
- Kimball: are you having issues finding people to work on the Java component of OpenCue? Brian: doesn’t seem to have been an issue so far, active contributors have been comfortable so far. Hard to know if it’s scaring away potential contributors. Nothing “too fancy” being done in there, outside of the scheduler, which is a more complicated component. Kimball: have been finding issues finding Java developers, so was wondering if that was a more general issue.
- Michael Min: hard problems such as schedulers, orchestration, permissions, is there some discussion around addressing those issues? Brian: yes, there are some of those features on the roadmap, didn’t include them in proposal since not sure about the timeline, have been having difficulty setting solid milestones, so most of the focus has been around improving existing functionality rather than brand new subsystems. Listed the broad goals, but there are lots of other features on the roadmap.
- Larry: Imageworks has switched over to OpenCue entirely, were still using internal version until recently, was a large project to migrate over (new DB system), had to migrate fixes from internal version to OpenCue, but that process is now complete.
- Eric: is it being used at Google? Brian: yes, some teams are using it internally. There were discussions around expanding cloud functionality, but that didn’t seem to be a priority from survey respondents. Cloud is being used for bursts, but not necessarily consistently.
- Proposal is to graduate from Incubation to Adopted status.
- Motion: Brian to move the motion, Larry will second. Approves, no opposes, SeanL: abstain, Michael Min: abstain, Eric: abstain. Motion is carried, congratulations, OpenCue has moved to Adopted status.
Patrick / OCIO
- Are in process of creating v2.0.1, should release beginning of May
- Officially sent that to VFX Reference Platform, v2.1 should be done by end of August, don’t have yet final feature set for v2.1 but working on it.