Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - September 17, 2025

Join the meeting at https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meeting/97880950229?password=81d2940e-c055-43b9-9b5a-6cd7d7090feb

Voting Representative Attendees

Premier Member Representatives

Project Representatives

Carol Payne - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group Representative, OpenColorIO Representative
Cary Phillips - OpenEXR Representative
Chris Kulla - Open Shading Language Representative
Diego Tavares Da Silva - OpenCue Representative
Jonathan Stone - MaterialX Representative
Ken Museth - OpenVDB Representative
Nick Porcino - Universal Scene Description Working Group Representative
Rachel Rose - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group Representative

Industry Representatives

Jean-Francois Panisset - Visual Effects Society

Non-Voting Attendees

Non-Voting Project and Working Group Representatives

LF Staff

David Morin - Academy Software Foundation
Emily Olin - Academy Software Foundation
John Mertic - The Linux Foundation
Yarille Ortiz - The Linux Foundation

Other Attendees

Robert Fanner, Foundry / OpenAssetIO
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Bill Ballew, Dreamworks
Doug Walker, Autodesk / OCIO
Jim Geduldick, Spaceboy Labs / OpenTrackIO
John McCarten, WETA / DNA
Karen Ruggles, DeSales University / D&I WG
Lee Kerley, Apple
Lorna Dumba, Framestore
Olga Avramenko, Sony Imageworks / D&I WG
Pierre Jasmin, re:visionFX / OpenFX

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Agenda

General Updates
- Dev Days - September 25th #1134
Pull in TAC Overview into main TAC website #1151
Annual Review: DPEL #472
Annual Review: OpenAssetIO #516

Notes

Annual Review: OpenAssetIO #516
- David Feltell, Robert Fanner
- Presentation Slides
- Interop standard for the tools and content management
- A common interface between tools, many to one instead of many to many
- Incubation Project Review
  - Locking in v1
  - Advancing available integrations
  - Released OIIO v1.0.0
  - More official and example DCC support rolled out
    - Nuke 16 (2024)
    - Katana - KatanaOpenAssetIO plugin
    - ComfyUI integration example - via OpenAssetIO-ComfyUI plugin
    - Based on community input, the UI Delegation API and sample code implementation
  - More Asset Managers benefit from seed/example code
    - Flow Production Tracking
    - Ayon in collaboration with Ynput
- Incubation Project review criteria
  - Have completed and approved the Technical Charter
  - OpenSSF Best Practice badge at passing level
  - Have a successful license scan
  - Have a defined project mission and scope
  - An overview of the project’s architecture and features defined
- Contributions
  - 387 contributions across 10 repos
  - Core contributors down to 1 part-time
  - Note: stats skewed by David committing contributions on behalf of others
- Organizations contribution and/or using in production
  - Foundry
  - MovieLabs
  - OTIO
  - ORIO
  - Ynput
  - ftrack
  - Brazen Animation
  - some direct contacts from studios, open source community
- Key achievements in the past year
  - OpenAssetIO v1.0.0 stable release
    - Including UI delegation API (fully framework agnostic)
  - New Industry Integrations
    - Nuke: more advanced support available in Nuke 16
    - Katana: KatanaOpenAssetIO AssetAPI adapter open sourced
    - ComfyUI: plugin adding image ingest and publishing
    - AYON: improved manager support demoed and under review by Ynput team
    - Flow Production Tracking: starter plugin developed and open sourced by Foundry. Some contacts with Autodesk, no engineering resources yet.
  - More parameters in Nuke can be driven by Asset Manager, more than just file path
    - Asset reference with Traits automatically ingested into Nuke
    - Publishing + UI Delegation
    - ComfyUI: Resolve -> ML -> publish image(s)
    - These showcases demonstrate end to end workflows.
    - They span frameworks like OpenUSD, multiple DCCs, and Asset Managers
- Areas the project could use help on
  - Marketing and Awareness
    - To encourage more prototyping, feedback and real-world adoption
    - To bring more DCC vendors, asset management vendors and studios on board
    - Overall value proposition ramps up significantly as adoption goes up
  - Resourcing
    - Studios and ISVs experimenting with OpenAssetIO shouldn’t be afraid to contribute!
- Collaboration on Trait Specifications
  - Aware of novel traits and use-cases developed privately by early adopters
    - Near term this is good - they’re meant to be extensible and get things off the ground
  - MovieLabs Ontology starting to carve out a standard
    - Encouraging collaboration and alignment with this standard should benefit all
- Feedback on working with ASWF
  - Fantastic to have organization around community initiatives
    - Dev Days
    - Virtual Town Halls
    - Etc
  - Docker containers from the CI Working Group
- TAC Open Discussion
  - JF: is I/O abstraction in scope? David: out of scope, we had a separate initiative initially, OpenFileIO, based on OIIO, but a separate project. So OpenAssetIO is not a filesystem abstraction. But OpenFileIO as an additional project would make sense.
  - Michael: origin story for some efforts came from efforts at Autodesk to get open asset model and library manager as open source. Initial larger scope was to have open asset model open sourced, have an abstraction of an asset schema, and the file I/O aspect as well. Foundry then took the baton for a specific part of it.
  - There’s a specification for an OpenAsset spec for describing groups of files.
  - Michael: is there consideration of using Adobe file format plugins as an abstraction for file types? A lot of USD conversions are looking at this? Robert: wouldn’t this flow through an AR2 plugin? We have some internal copies of the Adobe extension, it should be possible to give that a spin. David: OpenAssetIO communicates a URL and mime file type.
  - John: when would you want to move from Sandbox to Incubation? Robert: input from TAC would be important. We would like to have the incubation label. We take the feedback of needing a larger community? We want to take the guidance from TAC, but we would like to move to incubation. John: incubation stage requirements
  - Larry: maybe a goal for next annual review would be to go for a promotion, feels like it would be mature enough?
  - David: what would prevent incubation “right now”? Larry: nothing, if you want to go for that. Would like to look at the checklist and how close you are? But you guys weren’t sure you wanted to ask for this today? But if you are ready to go now, you can tell us how far you are on each item? Carol: from checklist in the slides, seems everything is there? Seems like you’ve done a lot of hard work, maybe we could nitpick, but there’s not a hard and fast rule. You have momentum, you have some adoption with some key partners, which is the hardest hump to get over. So if you are willing to go, let’s do it. Robert: Larry made point that some projects had large in-studio communities before joining the ASWF, so they had a “captive audience”, whereas OpenAssetIO is a from scratch project. Carol: this is why I’m looking at this differently, you have made a lot of project in a short time, your report had more progress than I knew / expected. Sandbox isn’t a place to be forever, don’t want to rush anyone who isn’t ready, but if you are ready, let’s do it.
  - Larry: maybe that step helps you get over the hump of adoption, you get a bit more publicity, and maybe some people see the sandbox level and think it’s still experimental? We discourage people from thinking rigidly about these labels, but maybe it will help? Also there are projects that every end user will touch, and some projects are more specialized, doesn’t make it less important. So it’s not about the number of “users” or “stars on GitHub”, that’s not how we measure things. It can be narrowly appealing yet very important.
  - John: if you want to discuss this at TSC level, but if you want we can do a LFX vote from your request. David: double check the link on the slide? Carol: if you already checked with TSC, then just say “go”. David: we will check. Carol: then reach out to us and we’ll get it done.
Annual Review: DPEL #472
- Matthew Low, chair of DPEL
- Presentation Slides
- Definition
  - A library of digital assets that demonstrate the scale and complexity of modern feature film production.
  - Curated by the ASWF, available free to researchers and developers
  - Main deliverables are the assets
  - Provide uniform legal agreement, vetted by ASWF legal
  - Provide a website to host the documents and promote the assets.
  - Two major assets this year
    - OpenPBR Shader Playground
      - Contributed by Adobe
      - Additional contributions from NVIDIA
      - Novel aspects of OpenPBR Surface
      - OpenPBR nodes within MaterialX documents (1.39) referenced into OpenUSD scene (0.25.5)
      - ACES 2.0, OpenColorIO, OpenEXR
    - Sole Mates - HDR production example
      - Contributed by Netflix Animation Studios
      - Complete 61-frame compositing package
      - Includes HDR render layers, Nuke script, and media
      - Created using DPEL NAS ALab Asset
      - ACES 2.0, OpenCOlorIO, OpenEXR
      - Potentially interesting to other projects (ORI, OTIO, …)
      - 3rd contribution from Netflix Animation Studio
    - Future Assets: ASC StEM v3
      - Reference material for Virtual Production / ICVFX
      - From ASC Join Committee on Virtual Production
      - Mix of 2D & 3D assets
      - Contributions from numerous studios
      - Shooting at Amazon Studios Los Angeles in October
      - Callout to David Morin, chair of VP committee
  - Download Statistics
    - Evaluate on downloads rather than contributions
    - Overview of downloads per week over last week
    - First full year of download data (truncations issues last year)
    - Estimated on number of downloads and asset sizes
    - 9000 downloads, 150 downloads per week
    - Expected peaks and troughs, holidays, conferences
    - Some unexpected spikes, like OTIO assets
    - Only tracks downloads from S3 buckets, not the ones fully on GitHub, looking to track those as well
    - Sizable assets: ASC StemV2 is 4TB
  - DPEL Asset Downloads
    - ALab most downloaded (4000), ASC StEM2 is next
    - Sole mates is only 141 but has only been up for a month
  - Seeing reasonable growth from last year, but that had truncated data
- Challenges and Opportunities (2024)
  - Note a source code project
  - Contributions are substantial and singular
  - Lower engagement, collaboration and TSC stability
- TSC
  - Matthew Low, DreamWorks
  - Ben Fischler, Autodesk, USC product owner
  - Darin Grant, Netflix Animation Studios
  - Eric Enderton, NVIDIA
  - …
- TSC Participation up to 75% for members, but also get 4-6 non members per meeting, happy to have external participation
- GitHub for Asset Hosting
  - Enable greater discoverability and collaboration
  - More readable, explorable, linkage
  - Better documentation with GitHub Pages
  - Encourage contributions
  - Best for assets restructured into smaller text files
  - 19 contributors, some projects are much larger, but first time we can engage with external contributors this way, happy to see growth
  - Represents first contributions from people outside TSC members or original asset creators
  - Contributions spiked in run up to SIGGRAPH 2025, would like to see this more normalized in coming years.
  - 113 active contributors, 68 organizations: great diversity of activity
- CLOTributor & Dev Days
  - Some listed as Good First Issue to take part in Dev Days
  - Our issues cover S3 assets, as well as ideas for scripts / tooling
- ASWF Collaborations
  - OpenPBR Shader Playground: reference for OpenPBR implementations
  - USDWG: promote the USD Publish guidelines. Project is a distributed USD based production, hosted on GitHub. Showcased at Open Source Days.
  - Goal is that projects can become part of DPEL itself
- Spotlight: DPEL in the wild
  - USD Render Benchmark from TheYardVFX, evaluate performance across multiple renderers. Uses ALab asset.
  - Pixar Performance Metrics: page which tracks loading and display times for USD releases. Uncovered issues in material setup for Moore House asset. Was able to give Pixar a heads up, which got fixed in future release
  - Anders talk on physical lighting for USD, using the Moore House asset. Great to see DPEL assets used as a standard.
  - Sizzle Reel from Chaos for their new Arena ICVFX product, using Moore House and ALab. There are link for attribution, but there are other examples of not being done “right.” Give guidance on how to cite our assets.
- Machine Learning Implications for DPEL
  - DPEL considering how to incorporate ML techniques
    - Does our license allow training of ML models using DPEL assets?
      - License mentions “training”
      - Considered revised License with an explicit stance
      - Varying views on “fair use” from copyright holders
      - FAQ: “it depends” on the use case: not changing the license, but an FAQ developed with LF legal to show how to interpret. Will share with TAC and governing board for feedback.
    - What areas of ML does DPEL want to explore?
      - Future Assets: ALab Gaussian Splats
        
        Gaussian Splat variant (PLY) of ALab from Netlix Animation
        
        Differentiable rendering
        
        Interest from Apple, Adobe, NVIDIA
        
        OpenUSD Splat Schema proposal
        
        Alignment with ML WG
        
        ASWF & DPEL can lead by example
- TAC Q&A
  - Michael Min: Is there a strategy for ? These bundles are quite large. If you are developing products around StemV2, how long does something stay online / persistence? Matthew: we haven’t considered archiving old assets if they become out of date. Some questions around maintenance updates, for instance with updates to USD. We would archive image data in standard def. Depends on interests of TSC members, but if TAC is interested in seeing assets, or a connection with a group that can provide it. Looking for something that demonstrates size and complexity which could be useful. Highlighting data sets adjacent to ASWF projects. Michael Min: Content Authenticity Initiative. Matthew: yes we are looking at this.
Pull in TAC Overview into main TAC website #1151
- John: put most of the presentation from Larry and Carol into a PR, please take a look and provide feedback. We’ll merge after next meeting.
General Updates
- Dev Days - September 25th #1134
  - Larry: please speak up?
  - For LA and Vancouver we will have in person socializing event. Olga: already posted in #devdays Slack channel. If you are around, even if you haven’t participated, please show up. Carol: information is in “all the channels”, please pay attention when Olga & Montana asks for something. If you aren’t in #devdays project led channel and need to me, please reach out. We have a good number of people registered, folks do things last minute, so be ready. Olga: in your project channels, let people know that DevDays are coming up and state that questions can be asked. Carol: there may be some prizes!

Next Meeting Agenda

General Updates
Annual Review: Open Review Initiative #436
Establish structure for projects to distribute binaries #1157