Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - February 4, 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 - Individual - No Account
Emily Olin - Academy Software Foundation
John Mertic - The Linux Foundation
Yarille Ortiz - The Linux Foundation

Other Attendees

Doug Walker, Autodesk / OCIO
Sean McDuffee, Intel Corporation
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Olga Avramenko, Sony Imageworks / D&I Working Group
Karen Ruggles, DeSales University / D&I Working Group
Jim Helman, MovieLabs

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Agenda

General Updates
- 2026 Security Reviews #1137
New Project/Working Group Proposal: New Project Proposal - VUE and PlantFactory #1059
Annual Review: MaterialX #486

Notes

Open Source Forum (Emily)
- Feb 26, LA and Virtual
- At Netflix, Sunset Bronson Studios
- Registration is open, for members only, using code 26ASWFOSFMEM
- Non-members: email Emily or events@aswf.io for code
- Leadership meeting at 11:30, for voting members
- Starts at 13:30
  - 2 Keynotes, one remains TBA
Membership Drive (David)
- Board goal to increase membership by 15%
- Hired group from LF which does this, help foundations raise membership
- Started doing calls earlier this week
- Tagline is: “If you use, contribute!”
  - Companies using our projects may not understand the value we add to their pipeline
  - Projects may be free, but there is a cost
  - Contribute
    - To the projects, contribute code, resources
    - Contributing financially as a member
- Slide deck with ASWF background
- No TAC action needed, but if you are talking to companies which are not members of ASWF, good time to prod them / ask them if they’ve thought about becoming a member, send me the name.
- Had conversation with Filmlight, related to ACES, they are using OCIO, OpenEXR, OTIO, OpenFX
  - Will report to TSC chairs directly
- Carol: good to hear directly from those companies that they are using our projects
Google Summer of Code (Larry)
- GSoC ASWF Submission
- Haven’t done it since 2022 due to rules change, but they’ve restored the previous rules
- Submission was done, no positive confirmation from web site
- We have to provide a page that lists a selection of projects students can work on, would be great to have 1 or 2 for each project. DM me to tell me what your projects need, suggested mentor, a couple of summer long projects a student could work on. Use GSOC tag in your repo issues. Please provide this ASAP, they will likely allocate us only 2-3 students, we’ll have to do the matchmaking based on skills and how they can best match our projects.
- Carol: thanks for doing that! Larry: Google sponsors student interns to work on open source projects, up to $6K. The object is real PRs, a great way to introduce people to our projects, get real work done, we’ve had success in the past.
- Karen (chat): I’d love to send out info alongside the SLP info wherever it makes sense.
- JT (chat): OTIO picked up a GSoC student that was awesome!
- Larry (chat): The “mentoring organizations” (us) have applied to participate, those will be evaluated and the list of accepted organizations posted in a couple weeks, and then it will open for students to apply to work on the accepted projects (and we can select our own students from among the ones who apply to us).
- Steve Shapiro (chat): Looks like OpenAssetIO may be missing from the summer of code page’s ASWF project list. Larry: you are right.
Add WG Charters to TAC website #1266
- Carol / John: proposing to put in WG folder of TAC repo, outstanding repo to put the D&I WG charter in there.
- Please look at it, both charter structure as long term WG. Yours might be different than D&I, but would request that WGs and LT WGs update their charters, in a state you are happy with, then submit a PR which will generate static web site.
New Project/Working Group Proposal: New Project Proposal - VUE and PlantFactory #1059
- Carol: hopefully everybody has had a chance to look at the materials / notes / videos. We’ve had subsequent conversations between TAC membership and at board meeting. If no one has thoughts, Cary and I will share ours.
- Larry: my concern is about whether is it OK to accept a project that no member company is willing to contribute to. Cary: ILM’s interest in the product and willingness to contribute to some limited degree, but after talking to the guys presenting, there’s minimal evidence of any other application in the industry. I wish them well and feel a kindred spirit, and admire wanting to see the project keep going. The founder of Bentley Systems comes from an open source background which is why corporate entity is willing to let it go. Would be good to see it succeed, but not necessarily our industry. There may be other entities in LF which may offer a governance model to help them out. Down the line if the project takes off, if ILM’s connection deepens, we can reconsider in the future?
- John: we are able to support them, we do all the LF onboarding first, that gives them the ability to remain an independent, unfunded project under LF, they can still be in the LF family.
- Carol: the correct thing to do is to thank them for their time, but the ASWF is not the right home. Larry: as a word of encouragement, a lot of our projects spent many years not in foundation, building use in studios. Not being part of ASWF may not be a hindrance. They can take all the governance model from us, and bootstrap their way to being used in the studios. We’re putting them through the same process everyone of our projects went through.
- Gordon: when we tell them they aren’t a good fit, we should say why: measured amount of industry adoption, that way they know why and what they would need to achieve. Also good for us to be clear on the why. Carol: the TAC website has a lot of this info, but it can be buried, we’ll make sure to expand on the decision making process. Cary, you OK with that? Cary: yes.
- Carol: a more challenging decision.
- Nick (chat): Would it suitable for O3DF? Chris: good point. JT: yup, IMO. I will help them with the LF family as I do with other LF projects as a community member.
Annual Review: MaterialX #486
- Slide Deck
- Jonathan Stone
- What is MaterialX
  - Represents CG materials independently of individual tools and renderers
  - Launched at ILM in 2012
- MaterialX Governance Update
  - Karen Lucknavalai becomes first TSC member from Pixar OpenUSD Team
  - Lee Kerley becomes the first voting TSC member from Apple
  - Frankie Liu becomes the first voting TSC member from NVIDIA
  - MaterialX TSC now has seven voting members and ten stakeholders
  - Work from Apple and NVIDIA in last two years has made them dominant contributors, recognize the great work that has been done
- MaterialX 1.39.4
  - Adds support for hex-tiled images, based on design and engineering work at NVIDIA
  - Adds support for WebGPU shading language, NanoColor names, lat-long images, animated materials
  - Including many contributions from ASWF Dev Days 2025 participants
  - Larry (chat): MaterialX has consistently been one of the most active projects for Dev Days participation.
- OpenUSD and MaterialX
  - OpenUSD 25.05 becomes the first release that defaults to MaterialX 1.39
  - Result of a major collaboration between the MaterialX and OpenUSD teams
  - Including important contributions from Autodesk and APple
  - Makes Asset versioning a stronger concept within OpenUSD
- MaterialX in OctaneRender 2026
  - OctaneRender 2026.1 ships with native support
  - First spectral renderer
- MaterialX in RenderMan XPU
  - Presented by Fran Gonzalez from RenderMan team at OSD 2025
  - Upcoming native support for MaterialX BSDFs in RenderMan
- Slang and MaterialX
  - Khronos and NVIDIA contribute support for Slang shader generation in MaterialX
  - Enables future machine learning and inverse rendering workflows in MaterialX and OpenUSD ecosystem
  - Could be start of a compelling collaboration between Khronos and ASWF
- Roadmap: OpenPBR Volume
  - A new project proposed by Autodesk and SideFX
  - Borrowing ideas from Houdini Pyro shader and Arnold standard volume
- Roadmap: Reference Path Tracers
  - MaterialX community has highlighted the importance of reference path tracers
  - Providing gold-standard renders that can be compared against production tools
  - One natural approach is to integrate OSL testrender into our graph editor
  - Other rendering options are WebGPU Shading Language and MDL
- TAC Open Discussion
  - Carol: we’ve been having similar discussions with other projects like ORI, what are your thoughts about hosting OpenPBR as sub project instead of standalone? Jonathan: subproject relationship has worked, allows people to attend meetings without overlap, and MaterialX / OpenPBR are so closely related. A reference implementation can be expressed as a MaterialX graph. Common leadership structure has worked out so far. Adding a new OpenPBR for volume, we’ll reconsider if it becomes unwieldy. Carol: as OpenPBR matures, they may want their own representation, but no timeline on that, what to do what’s best for the projects as they evolve.
  - Chris: a lot of great project. Can you talk more about XPU? Jonathan: implemented as a cross Disney collaboration, LucasFilm and Pixar involved, a lot of the same team as MaterialX Llama, not going to deprecate MaterialX Llama, graph definitions can be reused in Renderman. First need to make the BSDFs in Renderman itself. Development work required on the LucasFilm side.
  - Steven Shapiro (chat): does the governance from MaterialX translate to OpenPBR: Jonathan: we share a lot of the rules, but different voting members. OpenPBR started with Adobe and Autodesk, wanted to preserve that. OpenPBR Volume will have its own TSC, since that was contributed by Autodesk and SideFX.
  - Carol: lots of flexibility in setting up the governance model, as long as the trademarks and licenses are set up correctly. John: sometimes subprojects grow outside scope of project they start in, there can be an advantage to separate it out. Not “separate islands”, but given distinct space. Carol: we’ve got a lot of “stuff” interdependent within foundation, and sub projects within projects which wouldn’t exist without parent project. OCIO Configs wouldn’t exist without OCIO. For ORI, we thought that could become a single project, but that’s not going to happen, xStudio and OpenRV are completely separate projects, looking at splitting those up. OpenPBR and MaterialX are still intertwined, OpenPBR wouldn’t exist without MaterialX. Jonathan: OpenPBR does have some conceptual independence, but still deeply intertwined, would want to see OpenPBR implemented in multiple ways before it becomes independent. John: don’t want to force projects down a path, but give a structure. Also don’t want to add management layers.
  - Carol: it’s been a fun year collaborating with MaterialX and OpenUSD, good progress has been made.
  - Steven (chat): Does the governance for MaterialX translate as well for openPBR? I wasn’t aware subprojects could have separate governance so that’s really helpful info, Jonathan. Thanks.
John: we may have a new project presentation in two weeks. Carol: I will be on holiday, will leave Cary and John to steer the ship.

Next Meeting Agenda

General Updates
- ORI follow up on Incubation #1167
- AGENDA TOPIC: AI code assistant policy #1195
Add WG Charters to TAC website #1266
Annual Review: OpenVDB #480
2026 TAC Priorities #1208