Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - June 24, 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 - 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
Karen Ruggles - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group Representative
Ken Museth - OpenVDB Representative
Nick Porcino - Universal Scene Description 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

Jonathan Swarz - NVIDIA / RMTC
Bill Ballew - DreamWorks
Randy Packer - DreamWorks
Nick Porcino - Pixar / USD Working Group
Nicholas Young
Robin Rowe - Cinepaint
Sam Masterton-Gibbons - BBC
Deke Kincaid - Digital Domain
Doug Walker - Autodesk / OCIO
Frank Olivier
Jim Helman - MovieLabs
Lee Kerley - Apple

Meeting Assets

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Agenda

General Updates
- OSD: Project Fast Forward #1385
Annual Review: RMTC (Rongotai Model Train Club) #1075
Annual Review: CI Working Group #511

Notes

General Updates
- Guide Updates - John
  - Folks should be familiar with ASWF Landscape, don’t know if you are familiar with CNCF Landscape. They have a cool feature called the “Guide”, to explain what all the projects mean, the categories of projects. It’s dynamic, pulls in content. I want to do this for ASWF Landscape.
  - ASWF Landscape PR 1105
  - ASWF Landscape Guide
  - Built one using AI (Gemini), similar to CNCF, hopefully a helpful resources. Would like feedback since I’m not an SME. There is an open PR 1105 against the aswf-landscape, you can look at the YAML file. Good to comment on the descriptions.
  - JF: could this capture dependencies as well? John: that could be interesting. I can try to join a CI WG call.
  - Carol: the more we can put in one place and make it human readable the better.
- OSD: Project Fast Forward #1385
  - Carol: follow up from 2 weeks ago, Project Fast Forward talk at OSD.
  - Projects should update the presentation (Google slides), link shared in Team Leads Slack channel.
  - JF what about WGs? Carol: I have a slide for all WGs, don’t know if I’ll have time for a slide for each WG. May have to go very quick on each WG. But even the projects won’t have a lot of detail. Maybe WGs should provide a single sentence description.
- Larry on Vacation, but he did a lot of work crawling through project repos and checking for compliance in terms of documents and structure we’re supposed to have. We will be adding this to project review template. Every project lead should look at the report and try to make progress before SIGGRAPH. See Larry’s post in Technical Project Leads channel, we would like to have every project updated before SIGGRAPH.
- Nick: USD WG will need to add its documents, is there “boiler plate”? Carol: would copy what OpenEXR has done, it tends to be a great example of “what is done well”. Nick: do we have a place for project charters? Carol: project charters are in TAC repo? John: yes, there’s a spot in TAC repo.
- Cary: the work is fairly trivial, light editing of boilerplate, feel free to reach out to me.
- John: drop the WG charter into github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/tac/tree/main/process/working_groups
Annual Review: RMTC (Rongotai Model Train Club) #1075
- Presentation Slides
- Not following the template yet, hopefully we cover all bases. Will first cover the project, then go into details of what we’ve done last year, what we’ve implemented, the governance we’ve put into place.
- Mission: develop a VFX-specific framework for simplifying production and deployment of AI/ML models using well-tracked and rights-cleared datasets to enable clear provenance tracking
- 4 pillars
  - Track
    - Marking artifacts with licenses & rights
    - Asset manager integration
    - Injection into existing AI pipelines
  - Trace
    - Tracing across AI & CG pipelines
    - Querying artifact sources
    - Reporting
    - Watermarking
    - Non-prod interface
  - Train
    - Training guardrails
    - Dataset abstractions
    - Simple refinement training (for show needs)
    - Automatic Tracking (behind the scenes)
  - Infer
    - Inference guardrails (don’t use incompatible models)
    - VFX Asset Types (cameras, video sequences, poses, skeletons)
    - DCC integration (inference running inside DCCs)
    - Tensor processing
    - Automatic Tracking
- 4 core areas
  - TSC setup
  - Code updates
  - Production Testing
  - Comms and Community
- Technical Steering Committee
  - NVIDIA, Rising Sun, Imageworks, Weta
  - Juan Bhuler, Sony, John McCarten, Weta, Jonathan Swartz, NVIDIA, Troy Tobin, RSP, Kimbal Thurston, Weta
  - Since feb
  - Every 2 weeks
  - Centered around existing develop branch
  - Primarily architecture discussions and policy
- Policies and Process
  - Follows model project
    - Committers
    - Governance
    - Contributing
    - Security
    - Support
  - Novel AI policy document
    - AI definitions
    - Tiered adoption
    - Important to us
  - Issues Tracker
    - Github Tickets
    - coarse level of issues - more depth
  - Documentation
    - GitHub Wiki
    - TSC notes
  - CI / CD
    - Basic setup
  - LF PCC (Project Control Center)
- Code
  - RMTC/develop
    - Branch pushed Jan 28th
    - Purpose was for initial collab at TSC level - not a release
    - New system in place at WETA to improve cadence
    - Moving to main once internal prod use case is met
      - Want a production test case that tests everything
- Architecture diagram / layers
  - Facility Extensions
    - RMTC Weta
    - RMTC …
  - Core
    - PyTorch
    - ONNX
    - Neo4j
  - GUI
    - Provenance
    - Ingestion
    - Train Track
  - Ops
    - Train
    - Infer
    - Processors
    - …
  - CHARTER / Track
  - System
    - Scheduling
    - Environment
    - Objects
    - Containers
    - System
- Architecture / Flow diagram
  - Blue boxes: licenses and rights
  - Weights and models can be used in inference, runs against input and output datasets
- Workflow
  - Construct system & get license / solution
  - Create a weights …
- Video UI demo, creates a flowgraph to trace the dataflow
  - Produces a Provenance Report when you select an asset
  - Relates to watermarking
  - Can build a manifest to encode into the asset
- Updates (January +)
  - Licenses and Rights
    - Guardrails
    - License compliance checks
    - Rights control
  - Dataset complexity
    - Aggregations
    - Tabled data
  - Inference Complexity
    - Shares training schedulers
    - Complex inputs & outputs
  - Pipeline
    - …
  - Assets
  - Wrapping
  - Track & Ops
  - Refactoring
  - Bug fixes
- Train Track Test
  - Expose Foundation Model (with a GUI)
  - Refinement Training
  - …
- Hair mask solution run into Nuke
- Production Test (August WIP)
  - Wrap Complex Model
  - Guardrails & Production DB
  - Complex VFX Assets
  - Time Based Sequences
    - Manage GPU resources
    - Batching
  - Input EXR Sequence (the bridge at Rongotai)
    - Generates estimated depth w/ camera
    - COnstruct Input Dataset - inc IO
    - Pre create output datasets for depth & cameras
    - Construct …
    - Locate a solution / project & best weights/model
    - Define how the inference runs. Note: this will need to change
    - Run inference against inputs, populating outputs
    - Write out dataset & push to store
    - End up with graph in Neo4j
      - See License & Party, solution, Foundation Model & instance…
  - UI screenshot
    - End up with interesting diagrams when you run it multiple times
- Contributions (January+)
  - 14 external PRs
  - 27 internal PRs
  - 8 contributors
  - Gated on PR update from Weta & move to main
- Dev Days
  - Informal involvement
    - Wiki updated
    - Infrastructure contributions
  - Created impetus for ticket review with TSC
- Comms
  - Open Source Forum
    - Received well
    - Opened additional conversations
- Slack
  - Project & TSC channels
  - Discussion limited to TSC agenda
  - Still burgeoning
- Repository
  - Main branch not yet merged
  - PRs have been on non-systemic work
    - CI/CD
    - …
- Next
  - Adoption
    - Internal integration at Weta
      - 3 ongoing use cases
    - Adoption by TSC organizations
    - Seeking other adoptees
  - Tracing
    - Watermarking
      - Integration of C2PA
      - USD / Apple
    - Improved reporting
    - Pipeline to RMTC bridge
      - RMTC does not trace through CG pipeline
  - COMMs
    - SIGGRAPH
  - Features
    - OpenCue/Deadline scheduler
    - Separate tracking & ops DB
    - Workflow / DCC plugins
- Q&A
Annual Review: CI Working Group #511
- Presentation Slides
- Q&A
  - Thank you from Cary and many others
  - Cary: early on with OpenEXR, I got bitten by making a release where the project built fine, but broke something for a downstream project, something our CI wasn’t testing. So wanted to validate that our CI replicates downstream projects that consume OpenEXR. Testing all the CMake configurations / variables. But our CI does a ton of stuff, so it takes a long time to run. It’s been on my TODO list to refactor this, hopefully a lot of learnings across the group. We do a lot across every PR which doesn’t necessarily need it. Doing an audit of every projects, what can we learn, what can we offer, that could be helpful.

Next Meeting Agenda

General Updates
- 2026 Security Reviews #1137
- TAC Industry Representative Election #1291
Annual Review: Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) #1091
Annual Review: USD Working Group #518
Annual Review: Dailies Notes Assistant (DNA) #1040
Revamp Annual Review Structure/Template #1336
AGENDA TOPIC ASWF Project Health & Resource Framework #1377
2026 TAC Priorities #1208