Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - September 16, 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

Andrew Pearce - Alienrobot
Pierre Jasmin - RE:Vision Effects / OpenFX
Olga Avramenko - Imageworks / DNA
Nick Porcino - USD Working Group
Sergio Rojas
Doug Walker - Autodesk / OCIO

Meeting Assets

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Agenda

General Updates
- Dev Days 2026 - Sept 17th #1446
- AGENDA TOPIC: agent skills repo #1467
- AGENDA TOPIC Open Discussion / Q&A #1474
- DNA looking for studios #1477
Add Guide #1105
DPEL Annual Review

Notes

General Updates
- Dev Days 2026 - Sept 17th #1446
  - Olga: Dev Days is tomorrow! Don’t hesitate if you have questions, now is the time to ask. Make sure you post something in your channel, update issues tags, post links to “Good First Issues” for project participants. Be online / be present / give feedback.
  - Carol: ASWF projects don’t have option to opt out! (WG CI has a contributor)
  - Jonathan: having a lot of people signing up for issues not tagged as “good first issues”
  - Olga: 2 in person events, LA and Vancouver. I will be in Vancouver, Kiara in LA. Encourage people to attend, even if they don’t participate in Dev Days.
- AGENDA TOPIC: agent skills repo #1467
  - Michael: yes, worth pursuing
  - Carol: would want more information. Skills can be more unique to a workflow, is putting it in an ASWF repo an endorsement.
  - Michael: in my experience, have been doing a lot of this in the last year, writing up a lot of agents.md files for various projects, idea has been to do a bunch of work with an LLM, then asking it to summarize what we’ve learned, write it up as a summary, then have other reviewers code review them, then feed back into LLM. You end up with a readable by humans file which can act as a FAQ. About to release a code sample with a faily large agents file, useful for both humans and agents. Still useful even without LLMs.
  - JF: we need to put together something more fleshed out and submit to Slack.
  - Christopher (chat): Base skills / guardrails for a project
  - Carol (chat): Per project I get - aswf wide is where I’m struggling a bit
- AGENDA TOPIC Open Discussion / Q&A #1474
  - Emily: HPA Tech Retreat, CFP is October 1st, happening same week as VES Awards / Open Source Forum. If anyone is planning to attend, let us know, would be great to give a talk on ASWF / a project.
  - Eric: HPA is an interesting forum, different than what we do, different audience. An opportunity to reach a different set of folks. Higher level in studio leadership, think about how to target talks to those people. “How do you pitch MaterialX to studio execs”! Carol: we’ve done ACES / OCIO at HPA, since you get Digital Cinema folks. OTIO has done stuff at HPA. WOuld be good to branch out. Maybe DPEL focussed? Matthew: lots of Stem3 opportunities.
  - Eric (chat): ACES is a staple at HPA
- DNA looking for studios #1477
  - Olga: let’s wait
Add Guide #1105
DPEL Annual Review
- Matthew Low
- Slide Set Link
- DPEL
  - A library of digital assets - 3D scenes, digital cinema footage etc that demonstrate the scale and complexity of modern feature film production, including computer graphics, visual effects and animation. Curated by the ASWF…
  - Varied TSC
    - Chairperson: Matthew Low, DreamWorks
    - Members:
      - Christian Lopez Barron - Netflix Animation Studios
      - Eric Enderton - NVIDIA
      - Haley Kannal - AWS
      - Joan Panis - Autodesk
      - Michael Johnson - Apple
      - Nick Porcino - Pixar
      - Satush Goda - Netflix Animation Studio
- DPEL Assets
  - 12 assets hosted on web site
  - Provide infrastructure, AWS S3 or GitHub
  - Both 2D and 3D content, represents ASWF projects: OpenEXR, OpenUSD, OpenVDB, ACES…
  - Can be useful for other projects like ORI, DNA…
- License
  - ASWF Digital Assets License v1.1
  - All assets under the same license
  - In consultation with legal representatives of member companies
  - solely for education, training, research, software and hardware development, performance benchmarking … software and hardware demonstrations
- ALab - Gaussian Splats
  - Gaussian Splat variant of ALAb asset
  - Developed by Netflix Animation Studios
  - Contains original PLY and derived USD
  - Coordinated with development of new UsdVol ParticleField Schema domain and renderer from AOUSD and Apple
  - Also provides source SDR/HDR renders and COLMAP data
- ASC StEM v3
  - Reference material for Virtual Production / ICVFX
  - From ASCI MITC Join Committee on Virtual Production
  - Mix of 2D & 3D assets and short film
  - Contributions from numerous studios (11 sub assets)
  - Shot at Amazon Studios in Los Angeles
- MaterialX Teapot And Lion
  - Blog Post
  - Reference production MaterialX assets
  - Contributed by NVIDIA
  - Demonstrates modular multi-layer networks with blended inter-layer effects using standalone BSDFs
  - Originally authored to showcase neural materials
  - Released yesterday!
  - Already used to discover gaps in vendor applications
- Contributing Organizations
  - Adobe
  - ASC
  - AWS
  - Intel
  - Netflix Animation Studios…
- Contributions
  - GitHub not the core of our assets
  - 20 Active Contributions
  - 7 Active organizations
  - 111 commits
- Downloads
  - More relevant to DPEL
  - Showing growth from from 2025
  - 3415 downloads for Stem 3
  - 4554 for Alab (growth via splats)
  - Interesting that existing / unchanged assets since being released
  - For Stem v3, released at SIGGRAPH 9 weeks ago
  - Per week stats: large increase in downloads since Stem V3 release at SIGGRAPH
  - First week with more than 1000 downloads, nearing 10K downloads for last 12 months
- Spotlight: DPEL in the Wild
  - Not always easy to track
  - Papers: SIGGRAPH, Open Source Days
  - Product demos, render benchmark
  - Useful for DNA, numerous GitHub projects
  - Two highlights
    - DCC conformance: most vendors / member companies have used assets to harden workflows, one of the intended purposes
    - MaterialX Virtual Town Hall, all but one of the talks featured DPEL assets (including freshly released latest Teapot / Lion asset)
- VFX Industry Build Matrix Updates
  - N/A, but we document which versions of projects are used to create the assets
- Project Engineering Contributions
  - Tactical: 60%, Strategic 60%
  - Contributions from ASC and NVIDIA
- CI / Security / Marketing
  - Not much CI except website deployment
  - Shout out to marketing: several blog posts went out
- AI / ML code generation use / reporting
  - Not a source code project
  - But discuss project authoring
  - We have an FAQ to document not a policy, but our take of how our assets should be used, “training” is meant for training of humans, not ML models
  - But AI model training is not disallowed, depends on how the outputs of the model are used. If you use the AI model for research purposes, then it’s likely fine to use DPEL assets to train. But if output of model is to sell a product, then that’s not allowed.
  - C2PA - content credentials
    - Data could be updated to take advantage of those credentials
- Future: VILLAIN
  - Production data for live action short film, VILLAIN
  - Written and directed by Sparky Tehnsuko
  - Video and audio masters, Avid Media files, sound edits, titles, credits, score, VFX elements, preprod data, grade turnovers, various deliverables
  - Interest from …
- Future: Open Test Patterns
  - Library for 2D test pattern generation
  - Contributed by JD Vandenberg
  - Portable dynamic extensible generation of standard reference images
  - Outputs in any image format (OIIO) and color space (OCIO
  - Many possible front-ends, including hosted site, PyPI, static packaged outputs, etc
  - Consensus high-value project, considering best home
  - Lots of interest from community
- Future: MaterialX Stirling
  - High fidelity production asset from Pixar
  - Validation for arbitrary MaterialX BSDF networks in Renderman XPU
  - Derived from Finn asset from Cars franchise
  - But about that license? …
    - Disney considered DPEL license, compared with Moana Island Scene license
    - DPEL license inspired by Moana license
    - But Disney legal wanted a much more detailed license with a lot more restrictions on commercial use, strong clauses around brand guideline, not compatible with DPEL license
    - DPEL license not always successful, most of the time we can make it work, but sometimes not.
    - Still trying to make this work, but likely not going to work
- Areas the project could use help on
  - Soliciting assets or asset ideas
  - New contributors
  - Participating organizations
  - USD web development (web viewer for USD assets)
- Feedback on working with ASWF
  - Numerous collaboration opportunities
    - MaterialX, OpenPBR, USD-WG, OTIO
    - Adobe Apple Autodesk AWS DWA intel NAS NVIDIA Pixar
    - ASC, AOUSD, AOMEDIA
  - ASWF Marketing for blog posts
- Q&A
  - Carol: highlighting we have many different types of projects, doing great work in a structure which wasn’t necessarily built for this kind of project.
  - Matthew: it still fits nicely since we fit in with the other projects
  - Matthew: would be good if review didn’t happen week of Dev Days next year!

Next Meeting Agenda

General Updates
- AGENDA TOPIC: GitHub Security Manager role #1434
- Vulnerapocalypse #1403
- 2026 Security Reviews #1137
Revamp Annual Review Structure/Template #1336
AGENDA TOPIC ASWF Project Health & Resource Framework #1377
2026 TAC Priorities #1208