3.3 KiB
Minutes from 35th OpenVDB TSC meeting, December 5, 2019, (GMT)
Attendees: Nick A., Dan B., Jeff L., Ken M.
Additional Attendees: Andrew Pearce (DreamWorks), Daneil Elliot (Weta)
Regrets: Peter C.
Agenda:
-
Confirm quorum
-
Secretary
-
Outstanding 7.0 Items
-
PR568
-
PR578
-
Optional build dependencies/Thread pools and TBB
-
VDB Merge SOP
-
Roadmap discussion
-
OpenVDB Blog post by Emily
-
Website Logos
-
Quorum was confirmed.
-
Secretary was Nick Avramoussis
Update by Andrew with TSC recommendations from DreamWorks. The TSC has discussed with Peter C his desired involvement going forward, with the plan being to wait a few months to gauge how active Peter would be. Andrew confirmed that no one at DreamWorks is currently in a position to replace Peter as a TSC member. All members of the TSC express lots of interest for more people to contribute to all levels of the project.
- Outstanding 7.0 Items
An issue exists with PR 536 (merged), where virtual methods introduced to the Tree have not been guarded in an ABI clause. This produces crashes when VDBs created in other applications prior to these changes are passed to custom builds. These needs to be fixed before the 7.0 release. Ken to fix and push up changes, Nick to release once this has been tested and confirmed. All members in agreement that we should investigate ABI tests (OVB-118).
- PR568
Needs an additional approval before merge.
- PR578
Houdini 18 now requires a license when certain functions from its CMake modules are used (as they run hython). Our CI can work around this by manually providing an install path. Questions raised whether using hython here is necessary.
- Optional build dependencies/Thread pools and TBB
It would be nice if as many as possible of OpenVDB's dependencies were optional (tbb, zlib, ilmbase, openexr, boost are not). Specifically with TBB, generalizing our threading infrastructure would be extremely useful. A shared utility header/some other type of higher level abstraction providing common macros/links which can be used to implement custom schedulers or even completely disable threading would help provide more custom control over multi-threaded methods. Note that the C++ committee is currently working on a TBB "replacement" (executors), but this is not expected to arrive until C++20.
- VDB Merge SOP
Dan proposing a merge SOP which merges all types of volumes. This could incorporate a subset of the combine SOPs features, the most obvious of which would be union type functionality. There currently exists a Vector Merge SOP which will be confusing. Initial TSC reaction positive, Dan to put together a more detailed proposal.
- Roadmap discussion
Discussion to be delayed until after release. AX mentioned as a significant contribution, Nick is looking to priorities this.
- OpenVDB Blog post by Emily
Not many exciting things to include for a blog post bar those we've already mentioned. Consensus was that if we could wait until next year that would be ideal.
- Website Logos
Consensus that we shouldn't shy away from reaching out to companies who release software with VDB support with logo requests. The VFX platform logo should be last on the list on the website. Ken to reach out to some vendors.
- Next planned meeting is:
December 19th 2019. 2pm-3pm EST (GMT-5).