Trying to catalog some of the key pieces for the best practices badges that have tripped up our projects. Some answers will be very ASWF specific, others will be upstreamed to the project so they can be incorporated.
Want to clean up so we can get to a reasonable V1, but want to keep it as a living document.
Wanted to add a bit more rules around what’s included in ASWF Landscape. Want to add a rule for “significant adoption”. We don’t need to discuss this at length here, but would be nice to merge it.
Any interested in a demo of new Cinepaint version to the TAC? Robin: Cinepaint is quite old, was originally built in 2000, gradually became unmaintable, has been cleaned up, made 64 bit compatible, Windows version is up, Linux version and Mac versions are imminent. Cleans up everything that was wrong in the code base, not a lot of new features, but want to show it to remind it exists, but also hoping that people might have thoughts on new directions it could take. Now that it has a CMake build system, adding features should be easier. Would be good to have some kind of brainstorm session as to where it could go. It’s basically “Photoshop for image sequences”, similar feature set, and includes a flipbook. Larry: meetings can get pretty packed, so rather than using a TAC meeting for that, maybe announce for that, and make a separate meeting so you can have a longer time, a 10 minute slice may not be enough. Robin: I think having a small slice of the TAC meeting may be better than a separate meeting. John: let’s see how to work it in, might be a few meetings out but should be able to fit it in.
Open Source Days/SIGGRAPH
plan discussion (Emily Olin)
Tentatively scheduled for Sunday, August 6 and Monday, August 7
Day One:
Content determined by a CFP and program committee; projects encouraged to apply (similar to Open Source Days)
Held on our own at a hotel near SIGGRAPH. Open to everyone, virtually and in-person.
Historically people have spent the whole day
Day Two:
Virtual town hall presentations before SIGGRAPH
Held as BoFs at the JW Marriot as per of SIGGRAPH
Format can be a meet-up or a presentation
Projects that want to present on Day One can submit for the CFP
Can even use time for a TSC meeting
Within SIGGRAPH, so would need to be registered
Robin: did a conference adjacent to SIGRAPH a few years ago, could be successful to have an event just before SIGGRAPH since people are in town. Big decision is what hotel you choose. Picked a hotel near LAX, in BH, on Westside. But these hotels really want you to pay for lunch, which can be expensive.
How does this project work for you with virtual town halls leading up to SIGGRAPH? Carol: yes, sometimes we want to do very specific project updates, don’t need the stage at Open Source Days. If we can have project updates pre-SIGGRAPH in a virtual way, then we can use the BoF on Day 2 for discussion, Q&A, based on the presentation we already did before. So not trying to cram everything into 2 days at SIGGRAPH.
Want to turn this into an annual “tradition”
John: should have more info at next TAC meeting
USD Working Group Project Review - Alexander Schwank / Nick Porcino
Today
Status overview
Not presenting a charter / goals review
Not discussing recommendations for continuation
Not discussing converting USD WG to a Long Term WG
Charter
Support community in adoption and deployment
Consolidate and share best practices
Provide platform for community discussion around shared issues
Community focussed, not standards or development focussed
Sub Working Groups
Assets
Chess Set (@pablode)
Documenting Conventions
McUsd (@erich666)
USD/GLTF parity checkers (@beersandrew)
Preview test assets (@hybridherbst)
Composition puzzles (@asblev-nv)
Camera
VES Tech Committee/ASC collaboration on camera attributes
Starting discussion of on-set real-time needs
Games
Collected games industry feedback
Book of USD (Remedy Entertainment)
LOD proposal (Ubisoft)
Very active, new companies joining
What are the needs for USD in games, how to foster adoption
MaterialX
Chess Set
Coordination with MaterialX WG
Gained consensus that MatX is on by default when building USD, small but important decision
Web
Prototype web integrations with WebAssembly
An example of how USD can be used
Status
Membership and involvement continues to increase, now over 725 members. Meetings are consistently well attended.
Great diversity in presentations - diversity is a continuing focus
Increased outreach and involvement with other organizations, including ASC and VES
Working with groups such as Remedy Entertainment and The Met to bring best practices and other knowledge to the community
Broadening involvement with wider industry, including GIS, digital twins, simulation, education, exhibition and more
The live forum in zoom is a complement to usd-interest
Place for community to present and discuss newly created USD Proposals workflow
Questions?
Shannon: working on a blog post, would like to include this info so we can publicize what the WGs are, will need fact checking.
In April/May we added a Slack emoji when we surpassed the #random channel subscriber count
David: good work, growth for your group is just starting, hear more and more requests for your sub WGs. Want to make sure that structure of your WG is easy to find on ASWF web site, sub WGs can be a bit harder to find, so we should try to make that easier to discover. John: happy to help with that.
Alex: had 2 months ago kick off meeting on how to restructure the wiki, that’s being worked on. But will take any help that’s offered.
Eric E: very impressive work.
Nick: if there are specific questions about the number and topics of WGs, please forward these via DM or general Slack channel.
John: we have CI WG review next, then ORI and OSL
Carol: OpenColorIO had applied for Google Season of Docs but didn’t get accepted. Was an interesting experience, may go into it with more experience next year. Only 13 organizations got accepted, very large ones (NumPy, Conda), there will be case studies at the end of the year, so will read those. In doing the application, we had a decent amount of interest from some technical writers, interested in working on projects for us. We’ve talked about budgets, how we as TAC can ask for resources. Would like to fund to the board how to fund some technical writing. Can send our proposal to the TAC channel. Looking for Application Integration documentation: what does a DCC implementation looks like, what’s the minimum feature set, what the UI should look like. Proposals for needs that are outside the core expertise of the developers. David: yes, that’s good, we’ve been talking about how we can make some funds available to projects, if you have a proposal, let’s bring it to the Budget committee, having a concrete proposal would be great. Larry: second year in a row where we have declined to participate in Google Summer of Code, after a year where we had really good experience with that. While the Summer Learning Program is great, it serves a different purpose, and we haven’t seen the students involved with the projects themselves. What do we want to do in the future? The status quo seems to be that we’re not really doing anything to recruit students / interns. Carol: focus this year is the Hackathon, that is targeted this year, still lots to figure out, email to TAC members and companies coming. Have list of questions to run by David / Kimball / John, want to send email to Board and TAC so you can ask your respective companies. Larry: we weren’t sure it was the right match for us. Last year we didn’t get any candidates we liked (partly due to format change). But it leaves a gap in participation to an activity that seemed worth it. Pulling people in helps people and helps the projects.
Carol: Summer Learning Program, would love it if you could reach out to organizations you work with if you could let them know about our Summer Learning Program, we have 2 weeks until end of application, we aren’t quite where we want to be, may extend application deadline by a week. Application to ASWF Diversity and Inclusion 2023 Summer Learning Program Anywhere where someone would be interested to learn about technical careers in our industry, this year targeting applicants who identify as LGBTQIA+ There are items in the Wiki https://wiki.aswf.io/pages/viewpage.action?spaceKey=DIWG&title=Summer+Learning+Program Also would love to find volunteers we already have “enough” but more is always good.
Robin: was volunteer last summer, is call for volunteers out?
Carol: need for LF login is an issue we didn’t know when we switched to Confluence. John: shouldn’t be needed just for viewing, we can fix this.