ASWF TAC Meeting - January 26, 2022

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

John Mertic, Linux Foundation
Andrew Grimberg, LF Release Engineering
Alix Robinson, LF
David Morin, ASWF
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Scott Wilson, Rust WG
Deke Kincaid, Digital Domain
Allen Rose, Madison Square Garden Entertainment
Nick Porcino, Pixar Animation Studios
Morgan Prygrocki, Adobe
Sergio Rojas, Different Dimensions
Mitch Prater, Laika
Alex Meddick, Rising Sun Pictures
Bill Ballew, Dreamworks Animation
Scott Wilson, Rust WG
Sean Wallitsch, AWS

Apologies

Agenda

Welcome to Matthew Low
- Will represent Dreamworks
- Principal Engineer, involved in USD WG, real-time efforts
- Been attending for a few months, welcome!
Open Source Forum updates - David Morin
- How can we help?
- Want to improve coordination between Board and TAC
- General Update:
  - Board meets every month
  - Alternate between strategy meetings focussing on a specific topic with standard governing board meetings
  - Darin Grant elected as General Member Representative, improve value proposition for general members
  - Brady Woods, new representative from Microsoft
- Open Source Forum on March 10th 2022, at the Academy Museum, there are questions about in person meetings, will be a hybrid event hopefully with an online aspect for those who can’t make it in person.
- Academy Museum is open, exhibits are great, a good venue for our meeting, we had a previous meeting in 2019 when it was just an empty space.
- There will be people in attendance who aren’t ASWF members but could become members, TAC update important to highlight the outcome of the strategic work we have done and will be doing.
- Draft agenda for the day
  - 10:00: Museum open for in person attendees
  - Governing Board meeting at 11:00-12:00
  - 13:00 Keynote
  - 13:30 ASWF state of the union (Rob + David)
  - 13:45;14:45 TAC Summary
    - Work in projects and WGs in 2021
    - Where are we going in the future, new projects in the making such Asset Repository and other forward looking topics (Review and Approval?)
  - 15:00-15:30: VFX Reference Platform Studio Survey Results (Nick Cannon)
  - 15:30-16:00 Industry Topic 2 TBD
  - 16:00-17:00 Moderated discussion, what would you like to see the Foundation do?
  - 17:00-18:00 TAC meeting in person / hybrid
- How long should each member project highlight? 5 minutes (Brian)
  - David: yes, but don’t want to be too specific on format of the hour TAC update, what’s the best update we can give from the TAC as a whole, could be a series of series of short updates from our projects and WGs, but are there topics from the TAC we want to emphasize to demonstrate we’ve done what we want to do. Didn’t detail the agenda on purpose since would like the TAC to think about what’s the best presentation from the TAC’s perspective in an hour long format, which is a snapshot of where we are and where we are going. Demonstrate the value that’s been created.
  - Eric: should projects say a sentence or two of how they’ve been affected by ASWF projects / how having all the projects together has helped projects in general. David: yes, that sounds good, should take time in next few TAC meetings to figure out how we want to structure this. We’re not just talking to ourselves, we’re also talking to people who don’t know much about ASWF.
  - Goals of Open Source Forum 2022
    - Assemble our “Friends and Family”
    - Prospective new member companies
    - Share our results and plans
    - Get their feedback
    - Grow our platform
    - Grow our mindshare
    - Not a “fundraiser” per say, but want prospective companies to come out of the meeting with a strong idea why they should join
  - List of 40 non-member companies / organizations that we would like to have in our foundation, there’s a spreadsheet “Open Source Forum 2022 invite list”. If you know someone in those companies who could be a good person to invite, please contribute (also want to target companies that would have / could get approved budget to join). Spreadsheet is protected, but can request access, or send suggestions directly to David.
  - Kimball: when should we finalize the TAC presentation, in 2 meetings / 1 month? David: “as soon as possible”, can use some of the time now, should have a draft at end of next TAC meeting (2 weeks from now). Kimball: will be good to give people a moment to think about what could be a cohesive message. We’ll reserve a good time slot at the next meeting to discuss this.
ASWF Board strategy meeting on Virtual Production - David Morin
- Want to poll TAC meetings about VP
- A short history: trace origin to beginning of VFX industry, a need to connect devices to drive authoring experience on the software side. Phili Tippet on Jurassic Park, “dinosaur input device” allowed animators to animate characters, pointed out how useful these were. Evolved to the virtual camera, Peter Jackson on 2001 on first LoTR, Camera / Avatar on 2008, 2012 on Gravity. Now widely used in the industry.
- Next step was VR with FB acquisition of Oculus in 2014, film makers could step into world with VR goggles to get immersion, for instance Lion King.
- Can we share virtual worlds instead of individual experience of VR? Use of LED walls demonstrated benefits of shooting VFX. VP is no longer just used for VFX heavy expensive movies, but being used widely.
- Industry Initiatives - SMPTE
  - RIS - Rapid Industry Solutions
  - Produced a wall chart that represents Virtual Production
- vpglossary.com - VES Tech Committee, ASC, Epyc, a web site and a Discord server to discuss various terms, hoping to grow to be the place to define terms and make sure we have a common vocabulary
- Other initiatives in various guilds
- What can specific things can the ASWF do to help in the areas of real-time virtual production?
- pollev.com/aswf live poll
  - Metadata standardization to all for interop of systems
  - Asset IO / interchange for more flexible workflows
  - Improving the integration of open standards such as OCIO, OpenEXR and MaterialX with real-time pipelines in addition to off-line pipelines
  - Investigating technology to democratize virtual production for studios of all sizes
  - Gap analysis of data standards needed to support virtual production (gaps in existing standards and missing standards)
  - Production grade colour calibration solutions for display technologies used on set (ocio)
  - Solutions for pipelining realtime technologies
  - Superior device interchange data formats (tracking / input / etc… VRPN is old)
  - Wire protocols to communicate between packages and devices
  - The next OpenEXR for virtual production
  - Library to better integrate digital camera with physical camera (metadata flow, etc
  - Camera + Display interop solutions to enable DOP inputs and LEd display response to be integrated (more usable shots!!!)
  - Identify “orphan” but important VP open source projects that could benefit from being part of ASWF
- In some contexts it’s early, but VP also borrows heavily from existing broadcast, VR standards. VRPN is quite old, we need more modern solutions that can be integrated. Problems have been solve by other industry the technologies were borrowed.
- Michael Min: the USD camera initiative is already happening
- David: WG may look at a problem, provide conclusion and closes, or transforms into a project like we’re seeing with Asset Repository, which could be a good example of how to proceed in the future with forward looking WGs.
- David: poll will remain open for a few hours if there are more ideas, results from Governing Board:
  - Improve interop between traditional DCC apps and realtime apps leveraging USD
  - Develop an open standard for real-time assets with behavior (drivable cars, camera models etc) so that they can transfer between applications and to consumers
  - Add several “quintessential” real-time virtual production environments to the digital asset library. Consider several that are suitable for today’s hardware and software and several that are out of reach of today’s hardware for real-time work
  - Establish and write sample code to establish a standard protocol for virtual cameras to interface with DCC and Game Engine applications
  - Haven’t focused on VP myself much but are there any utility libraries (managing timecode, data processing etc) that are common across different implementations that should be encouraged to submit for consideration?
  - Look at all interface points between tools and between actors and, if there’s a problem to be solved that’s appropriate to the ASWF to address, facilitate open source solutions
  - Create and document a standard for a parametrically defined human that is suitable for real-time
  - Create toolsets to help automate multiple LOD model and texture creation
- We don’t have to get involved with VP, but it is a topic of much interest right now.
Project Updates
- OpenCue : Brian. Spending time at TSC meetings to discuss details of proposed user and permission systems, in the early stages, what it will look like, and how it will integrate with some of the other authentication systems already in use (AD, LDAP). Don’t have a lot of experience in the TSC, so looking for experience / advice. One of the goals for this year is improving documentation, was a mid level goal last year and didn’t make a ton of progress, so highlighted for this year. Looking for tech writing help, looked in the user base, companies represented on TSC but not much success. So wanted to bring up to wider TAC, proposal is to establish a tech writing resource for member projects, or maybe LF can help? Could be beneficial to all member projects, Open Source projects can use help in this space. Is there any appetite? John: have worked with some people in the past, can possibly provide help. Michael Dolan: OCIO would be keep to leverage such resources. John: would be useful to scope the expectations, what’s the current state of documentation for the project, how much effort to maintain it. Brian: will start discussion thread and talk to Michael to help coordinate.
- Raw2aces - Kimball. No TSC meeting, but repo is moved over, prepping contribution from WETA.
- OpenEXR - Cary: on the cusp of new release later today, patch release with some bug fixes, vast majority caught by OSS Fuzz project.
- OSL - Chris: presentation from Intel about planned work to support new line of GPUs, SPIRV backend for OSL, ties in well with work for NVIDIA GPUs. General refactoring to support multiple backends. Able to better customize callbacks, nice chunk of work happening in that area. Discussion on the space between OSL, MaterialX and USD, specifically talking about way that renderers approach binding a shader to a scene, beyond just the “one material to one shape”, hierarchical approaches beyond USD approach, rep from AL presented their approach. Planning to wite something up to bring up in other forums. Jonathan: a topic of interest to MaterialX, hoping to have presentation from Autodesk at next TSC.
- Cory - USD: Most activity in subgroups such as MaterialX and Camera. Michael Min: USD Camera has been busy, getting folks from other part of industry to contribute, what is it that makes a CG camera / match move camera, provide a community to share. Motivating discussions upstream at vendors, trying to unify data being generated, and what maps to a CG camera. Foundational work, lots of energy. Cory: USD MaterialX is just starting, discussions about scheduling, discuss interrop between USD, MaterialX and Hydra. Also discussion on WebAsssembly, looking at creating simple web apps as demonstration of the technology. Presentation from Blender about their USD integration at last session.
- MaterialX - Jonathan: Autodesk has contributed large feature, full support of MaterialX API via Javascript, now have a simple web application that lets you view MaterialX materials in the browser. Have heard of an effort to build a graph editor. Integration with NVIDIA Omniverse, and AMD with their library which uses MaterialX
- Assets Project - Eric : project going well, AL will check in a version in one of our repo to shake out issues in the process. Working with Amazon on the rigged character asset they are contributing. ASC StEM v2, 16 minute reference footage film, added clause to the license that’s been approved, ready to use that license. 10TB asset that we need a place to host and serve up! Stretch goal to get that done by March 10th to show at Open Source Forum.
- OpenVDB - Ken: started conversations on roadmap for V10, due in November, looking to be a big release, gave a presentation on a new command tool, a lot of high level functionality in OpenVDB was only exposed in DCCs, now available as a command line tool. Hopefully will make it into V10. Will present V10 list next TAC meeting.
- OpenTimelineIO: Nick - Trying to get things in order for a 1.0 release, in the middle of procedural bits like getting DCO automation setup, going smoother than it did for OpenEXR, good that they laid down the groundwork.
- Rust WG - Scott: main goal is to get OpenEXR bindings handed over to OpenEXR project, also a bunch of people interested in building bindings for the other libraries. Trying to create a template project that people can use as a basis for creating their bindings.