Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - January 21, 2026

Join the meeting at https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meetings/aswf?view=list&projects=aswf

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
Daniel Greenstein - OpenImageIO 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

Colin Chargy - VUE / PlantFactory
Karen Ruggles - DeSales College / D&I Working Group
Steven Shapiro - Foundry
Charles Wardlaw - NVIDIA
JT Nelson - Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Tony Micilotta - Autodesk
Daniel Seebacher - VUE / PlantFactory
Walter Beck
Sebastian Herholtz - Blender Foundation

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Agenda

General Updates
- ORI follow up on Incubation #1167
- AGENDA TOPIC: AI code assistant policy #1195
- 2026 Security Reviews #1137
- OpenPGL Project Vote Update #1238
New Project/Working Group Proposal: New Project Proposal - VUE and PlantFactory #1059
Annual Review: D&I Working Group #473
2026 TAC Priorities #1208

Notes

Notes taken after the meeting, attendee presence is incomplete.

General Updates
- OpenPGL Project Vote Update #1238
  - All passed!
- 2026 Security Reviews #1137
  - John: still looking for 2 projects willing to do this. 1 is interested, but looking for another. Carol: if no ones comes forward in next couple of weeks, we’ll request projects to volunteer.
Annual Review: D&I Working Group #473
- Carol / Karen
- D&I WG Presentation Slides
- A Long-Term WG, asking for approval to continue to be a long-term WG
- Mission statement is mostly the same with some wording update, and updated some wording on focus areas:
  - Guide ASWF Diversity & Representation
    - Be a guiding force towards diverse leadership and membership across the Foundation and its projects, working groups and events.
  - External Outreach and Education
    - Encourage and enable/empower high school and college students to pursue a career in or participate in open source projects by educating them on uses in the Media & Entertainment industries.
  - Member Guidance
    - Provide guidance and resources for ASWF members to educate their colleagues on open source and D&I topics, especially junior engineers and internal D&I organizations.
  - Initiatives need to fit in one or more of these categories
- For Today’s Update
  - What did we do?
  - How did we do?
  - What are our plans?
  - What input do you have?
  - Some feedback from Karen and myself
  - Had ambitious plans last year, we like to chop up in quarterly plans. We had lots of stuff for each quarter in 2025. But we missed some stuff, it’s OK, as a group did some great work, and we’ll talk about the things going well with us. But I’ve been reflecting on 2025, which was a little rough. It showed up for me and Rachel in the general state of things, and being oversubscribed. I don’t see this changing for me this year, so I need to be better at delegating. Karen will officially be the co chair this year. As a leader for this group last year, I could have done a better job, some things which slipped through the cracks were due to lack of time from Rachel and I. But things are not unfixable, not every year will be as productive as you want to be. Need to right-size the initiatives we take on based on resources.
  - But did some cool stuff, and some initiatives to push in 2026, some may not as priorities shift and change.
  - Last year we did work at beginning of year on updating our charter, we needed to update it once we became a long term WG. Still working on right place to put this in our repositories. We’re not a project, so we need to figure this out. We updated a lot of the wording in our charter based on the nature of the group changing.
  - We also updated the description, missing and pillars of the group. Several rounds of feedback with participants.
  - 2 new big sections in charter:
    - definiting what it means to be an Initiaive Lead: you are stepping up to the plate to lead a project we are working on
    - defining the co-chair roles, which were previously undefined, like terms, elections…
  - Karen: feedback from the group was very helpful
  - Carol: we’ve done our first leadership transition, Rachel Rose was co-chair since founding, Karen is now co-chair with me.
  - Karen: I’m faculty at DeSales, in CompSci teaching 3D graphics. I’m been working with D&I Group in 5 years. Excited about the group. Summer Learning Program alums are making keep differences.
- Summer Learning Program
  - Summer 2025
    - Under-represented gender identities
    - 18 learners (over 100 during 5 years)
    - Industry Talks
      - ILM
      - Dreamworks
      - Walt Disney Studios
      - Netflix
    - Structured Group Learning Time
      - Soft skills and networking
      - SLP Alumni Panel
      - ASWF projects
    - Combo of FXPHD and Udemy
  - Working on Summer 2026
  - Alumni love learning under ASWF, want to convert them under Dev Days maybe. Hopefully push them towards M&E / Animation. We use FXPHD and Udemy, which can be customized for their interests.
  - Big Wins
    - Continue success from organizational transition of 2023
    - Prioritized Speaker Series
    - Great, active cohort including their desire to be involved after SLP
      - Get SLP alumni to present, some are becoming professionals
    - Continue to iterate
  - Improvement opportunities
    - Need to grow mentor pool to facilitate better matching
    - Need to standardize long-term, operational support from greater ASWF
  - The program is working
  - Internship placements at Pixar, Disney Animation, Bolt Graphics
  - Job placements at Dreamworks, Google, Epic Games, Jellyfish Animation, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and more
  - Many learners continuing to higher education in technical / entertainment focussed areas of study. One went to MIT Lab.
  - Reaching out to SLP alumni, connecting on LinkedIn, found great results. Encourage them to become ASWF advocates / ambassadors.
- Organization Opportunities
  - Leadership Transition
  - Strengtn SLP
  - Form bridges between D&I and Outreach group: didn’t happen
  - Partner with OpenUSD DEI group, will continue with this. Have ideas for more work this year.
- Up Next: Initiatives
  - SLP 2026
    - Discussions on what it’s going to look like, info soon, and volunteer opportunities
  - Contributor Connection Initiative
    - Temporary name for something we keep circling around, used to call it Ambassador Program. Thinking about a different way to formulate this, Karen and I talking about tangible next step after SLP / DevDays. We should have a group of people who are tasked with connecting with these folks, form a connection, what comes after a first DevDays contribution.
  - International Science Fair Discovery
    - Looking for someone on the scholastic side, get information, how can we get connected at the high school level.
  - TAC Diversity
    - Did not do this initiative last year. A few years ago we did an initiative with the board to talk about importance of diversity, Board came up with a diversity plan, implemented it. Alternates, thinking about how to appoint board levels. Won’t look the same at TAC level since makeup is quite different. We would be interested in D&I WG to work with the TAC if there is interest, but need to be aware of TAC pressing matters. Looking for feedback.
- TAC Feedback
  - Things we need
    - Participation: drop off in last 6 months, meeting participation, engagement on Slack
  - Questions for the TAC
    - Are we focussed in the correct areas?
    - Where could we help your projects success?
  - Contributions don’t have to be only engineering. D&I WG doesn’t succeed without participation. We’ve proven we can produce awesome programs such as SLP and DevDays. We’ve proven we can deliver, but we need participation. Results are clear when people get involved.
  - Ask is to look at company involvement, and how they can get involved.
  - Karen: we do good work, as shown in the slides. Other opportunities are mentors who interact with SLP, also attending meetings. Mentoring can be invigorating, engaging with someone new in the industry. Think about the next wave, when we started out, we would have loved to have a mentor. You have something to offer.
- A couple of minutes for discussion or questions
  - David: WG contribution to ASWF has been tremendous. We want to help, if you need budget for instance. When is SLP 2026 starting? Karen: haven’t announced officially, but happy to share working document. Trying to keep it repeatable, so we intend to start SLP 2026 on June 1st, end July 30th, so June - July. SIGGRAPH in middle of it this year which makes it a bit tricky.
  - Larry: it’s great that SLP alumni are getting placement, do you have a feeling at people of these companies understand the value of SLP? Are they trying to be supportive? Also you aware of any SLP participants who have gotten involved with projects?
    - Karen: we typically offer a talk about recruitment, SLPs get told about what’s good in their demo reel. Haven’t gotten complete list of who ended up where. But we don’t know if the companies really saw the SLP value. But next thing of SLP, we need to trumpet what we do. Work with member orgs to create a pipeline.
    - Carol: there are a few targeted examples of member companies who hired someone because of ASWF / SLP involvement. But perhaps not the majority of cases, so working to improve that. But definitely several examples.
    - Karen: for SLPs converting into contributors, we’ve been more intentional about this. Last year Carol did fireside chat about ASWF, all the projects, a couple of students engaged in Dev Days.
- Carol: feel free to reach out to either myself of Karen for more info, and attend our meetings.
- Carol: do we need to do a group? John: since we’re not changing maturity level we don’t need to do a vote.
- Stephen (chat): I have seen a lot of interest in Stop Motion Animation in high schools in the US and UK, if that helps plant a seed.
- Karen (chat): D&I Working group can be found via Slack in #diversity which is a great way to stay connected including applications to be involved with SLP (mentor, speaker, etc) Our meetings are 2nd Tuesdays of the month 12pmPT/3pmET. Next one will be February 10th! Check out the calendar for all meeting registrations and links!
New Project/Working Group Proposal: New Project Proposal - VUE and PlantFactory [#1059]
- Presentation Notes
- Speaker Introduction (also Daniel Seebacher)
  - Colin Chargy: Former member of the VUE / Plant Factory dev team (joined 2013, worked for 10 years)
    - Core developer
    - DevOps engineer
    - Linux specialist
    - Convinced Bentley Systems to release as open source 2 years ago
  - Intention to act as initial maintainer & technical continuity point
  - Motivation:
    - providing long term sustainability
    - growing and transferring knowledge to the community
    - aligning the applications with industry needs to encourage professional usage
- A brief history
  - Originally developed by e-on in Paris in 1997 by Nicholas Phelps
  - First version Vue D’Esprit 1 developed by Nicholas Phelps and released in 1997
  - Company growth, early introduction of procedural and node-based workflows around 2004/2005
  - large-scale scattering systems and integration plugins for Maya, 3DS Max, Lightwave, Softimage & C4D introduced in 2005
  - Volumetric spectral atmospheres introduced in 2006
  - First version of PlantFactory introduced in 2013
  - E-on software acquired by Bentley Systems in 2015
  - Products EOLed and made available for free in 2024 due to company-wide product line restructuring
- VUE
  - An artist-friendly environment authoring tool designed to assemble large environments quickly and efficiently with non-destructive workflows and infinite procedural variation.
  - Core Capabilities
    - EcoSystems & procedural plants (integrated with PlantFactory)
    - Terrains & procedural planets
    - Environmentally aware materials
    - Procedural ocean
    - Art-directable spectral atmosphere system with volumetric clouds
    - Extensive export & integration capabilities
    - Accessible front-end for easy workflow & fast iteration, but everything is powered by nodes under the hood
- PlantFactory
  - A comprehensive node-based procedural vegetation authoring tool for creating high-quality plant models for both real-time and offline rendering purposes.
  - Core Capabilities
    - Node-based workflow with support for manual touch-up, pruning and drawing
    - Infinite procedural variations with automatic LOD mesh creation
    - Support for season, maturity and health
    - Extensive Preset & Published Parameters system
    - High degree of randomness control & advanced growth logic
    - Plant models usable standalone (as baked meshes through export & plugins) or integrated within VUE (as procedural assets)
    - More technically advanced than other modelers, but much more control & flexibility
  - PlantFactory preset examples within one *.tpf species file each
    - Palm tree shape presets
    - Maturity examples
    - Oak tree shape presets
    - Season examples
- VUE + PlantFactory
  - Shared foundation and workflow continuity
    - Common code base & shared repository
    - Shared procedural wind model (scene-wide wind interaction in VUE)
    - Common node system (fractals, math, colors, logic…)
    - Shared render engine
    - Interactive editing of PlantFactory plants from within VUE
    - Coherent authoring workflow from asset to environment
  - Where we left off in 2024
    - Codebase cleanup and refactoring
    - Opening the apps up to modern pipeline integrations through:
      - Extensive export capabilities
      - New plugins (eg Unreal Engine with support for Pivot Painter 2 wins, Omniverse connectors for both apps)
    - Implementation of the Hydra USD bridge for rendering (tech preview of Cycles inside VUE 2024)
    - Full USD support introduced in 2021
    - Rewrite of linear workflow
    - Preparation for integration of MaterialX
  - Known Limitations
    - Legacy CPU-based rendering
    - Materials, nodal and atmosphere systems tied to legacy (CPU-based) renderer
      - We do have a GPU based path tracer, but cannot render some of the features
    - The apps predate some modern standards such as OpenColorIO, ACES, or DeepEXR support
    - Viewport engine needs modernization
    - Plugins need to be updated after two years of development hiatus
    - User interface is still under development for the Linux version
  - Long term vision (not product or roadmap specific)
    - Preserve, stabilize and extend the procedural authoring core
    - Modernize and modularize legacy components over time
    - Improve pipeline interoperability with modern standards (benefiting from other ASWF projects)
    - Explore new rendering paths within the community
      - updating the legacy renderers?
      - improving the existing GPU-based path tracer?
      - incorporating external rendering support? (through Hydra USD?)
    - Improve plugin user experience by relying on each host app’s native UI system and specificities
  - Community and contributions
    - Initial contributors include former e-on software team members (devs, support, PM/PO)
    - Further contributions from Blender add-on developers, former Maxon and Lightwave developers
    - Small, but active user community exists for the current freeware versions
    - Interest in using the apps has been expressed by
      - Universities for technical research and AI training
      - Small studios with visualization and all-in-one software needs
      - Gaming studios with needs for plant modelling and sky boxes
      - The Blender community
      - The Geographic Information Systems community
      - Studios reevaluating their environment pipelines
      - Technical artists focussed on procedural workflows
  - Open Sourcing Status
    - Codebase has not been open-sourced yet
    - Ongoing work to separate VUE/PF from another not-to-be-freed IP in the same codebase
    - Chosen license: Apache 2.0
    - Support from ASWF would be beneficial for:
      - Creating the governance model
      - Defining clear contribution rules
      - Transitioning everything to an open-source mindset
      - Using network resource to target more users who would like to contribute to the projects
  - Transitioning to open source
    - Accounting for codebase size and complexity:
      - preparing CI/CD and DevOps pipelines and implementing automatic testing as early and often as possible
      - Preparing for phased releases (not all existing features such as plugins might end up in the initial open-source release)
    - Accounting for the initial learning curve
      - Providing documentation for new contributors
      - Improving and reducing code for easier readability
    - Transitioning from proprietary to open governance
      - Following best practices for open sourcing (for example adhering to security and compliance from the Open Source Security Foundation)
      - Implementing ASWF guidance and best practices
- Product Demos
- Q&A
  - Charles: asked for permission to contribute to Mac port, which may not get as much attention. Waiting for auth from NVIDIA. Daniel: yes, Mac version has been less stable. Charles: I use all 3D software on Mac. Daniel: were working on native ARM version before EOL happened.
  - Cary: first heard about this a month ago, agreed to sponsor. At ILM we used VUE a long time ago, don’t currently use it, in general we have an interest in using it, recognize it serves a good place in the industry. Other tools come with various problems that make an open source option attractive. Which is why we agreed to sponsor it.
  - Steven Shapiro: any integrations with Foundry products? Can check internally. Daniel no integration. Steven: is USD integration native, or import / export? Daniel: we’ve implemented export, with connector for Omniverse, but in one direction only. For freeware had to remove those connectors since they couldn’t be maintained.
  - Gordon: great presentation! Can you speak about the adoption, you talked about an interest from various environment pipelines. Who uses it today in entertainment space? Daniel: in recent years due to CPU legacy renderer, VUE was dropped from a lot of pipelines, but saw pickup in games pipelines. But what was created in VUE had to stay in VUE, and was tied to legacy renderer. So working on more export plugins so you could render where you wanted to. So no major movie productions in recent years, but lots of interest for gaming workflows, individuals, “out of the box” use cases. Wanted to modernize the render engine, integration with MaterialX to avoid having to bake out.
  - JT (chat): I love VUE/Plant Factory. It was a staple for years in the boutique studio scene. I’ve worked with it quite a much, some of my associates have extensively. It’s got my non official vote of confidence. I will take the lead to integrate it into O3DE game/sim engine for our vegetation system. I’ve seen incredible and beautiful work with VUE/Plant Factory. It’s scattering tech for large scale scenes is quite powerful. I’ve seen outstanding work with that aspect. In my opinion, there is a huge former user base that have used it in the past and now are industry professionals. Open 3D Foundation, the parent of O3DEngine might be interested. An LF sister foundation.
  - Eric: if it doesn’t fit in ASWF, where else could it fit? Blender Foundation? Others? Colin: Blender Foundation directed us to ASWF, but told us if we don’t find a new home, they will host it. Also hoped LF could do it, Eclipse foundation as well. Carol: what does your team see as benefits of ASWF as your first choice? Colin: we want to be aligned with the industry, Blender Foundation mostly dedicated to Blender, they could host us, but not main purpose. LF and Eclipse not specific to DCCs. Eric: you also have interest outside of film (games, gis, academia). We aren’t so great at getting our stuff on Windows / Mac. Carol: if you find that high end film / RT graphics is where you want to be, then it lends itself well to ASWF. You realize the large amount of work needed to get our industry to re-adopt it. Everything you’ve outlined seems correct, but there’s a lot of work. Colin: biggest piece of work is to grow a community. Daniel: at Bentley we were a small team, and we had a third product (not open sourced). We’ll need to attract as many contributors as possible, except slow development, but better than no development. Technologies inside applications are worth preserving. PlantFactory hasn’t been on the market as long, so less modernization work required compared to VUE.
  - Sebastian: are these only full applications, or are there sub libraries that could be integrated elsewhere, for instance the logic of the plant generation. Colin: currently codebase is mostly monolithic, there are some components we could separate such as GPU path tracer. A goal is to modernize and modularize, so a long term goal.
  - Carol: you are applying at the Sandbox level? Colin: I don’t know. Carol: assuming likely sandbox. Colin: may not have filled out that question. Daniel: we’re not sure where to fit exactly. If it’s about the governance model, then definitely sandbox, but the maturity of the software is not a sandbox project. So we need guidance of where we would fit in, transitioning from 30 years of commercial product to open source. Carol: when I think about levels, adoption is the biggest factor. Incubation project has expectation of existing use in the industry, then achieves graduation. Sandbox is a bit more of a “green field” and less defined on purpose. Could be anything, including something that’s been around for a long time but needs attention. We don’t have to decide now. Daniel: PlantFactory is ready to be adopted as is, a very mature product. VUE is also very mature, but requires legacy refactoring to be able to achieve adoption help we hope to have.
  - Cary: most of our projects started as internal projects at VFX studios and made transition to open source prior or after joining foundation. A lot of the effort was around generalizing them, extracting them from peculiarities of internal pipeline, and professionalizing them (CI…) Your project has a different arc, coming from a commercial background, you may already have done a lot of what our projects have done. Carol: not bad, just different
  - Sebastian: how is your current development funded? Still working at company, or is this more a hobby? Colin: neither of us working at Bentley Systems, I have NDA to work on the code, but this will be my hobby. Daniel: same for me. Carol: this is fair, a lot of our projects work this way, we survive on contributors paid for their companies (which is one reason why we require a TAC sponsor).
  - Eric Enderton (chat): which API does the GPU renderer use? Colin: OpenCL
- Carol: it’s been a great discussion. Our votes happen offline, please post your presentation and videos in the TAC channel. We won’t initiate a vote quite yet, we want folks who weren’t here today to view the demos and read the notes, we will discuss and run the vote. We appreciate this has been a long process for you.

Next Meeting Agenda

General Updates
Annual Review: MaterialX #486