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Minutes from 76th OpenVDB TSC meeting, Jan 19th, 2021, (EDT)
Attendees: Nick A., Jeff L., Ken M., Dan B.
Additional Attendees: Johannes Meng (Intel), JT Nelson (Blender), Andre Pradhana (DW), Richard Jones (DNeg), Bruce Chernaik (Intel), Laura Lediaev
Regrets: Peter C.
Agenda:
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Confirm Quorum
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Secretary
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AX
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Andre joining TSC
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Images
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TAC Survey
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VDB Activate SOP
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CSG Intersection Bug
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Inline Half
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Next Meeting
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Confirm Quorum
Quorum is present.
- Secretary
Secretary is Dan Bailey.
- AX
Nick looking to get PR931 merged as soon as possible. This is the last piece that requires maintaining a separate DNeg repo which is time-consuming.
Attributes to create needs fixing so that it includes pattern matching. Jeff suggests looking into using UT_String::multimatch() for this.
Active tiles should be densified by default, as constant tiles should be primarily considered a space-saving optimization and not affect which data gets evaluated. Easiest solution is to globally densify and constify. Better approach would be to stream - densify and constify each tile in turn as it's processed - this is more challenging to implement but would likely reduce memory footprint. Easiest solution is likely most appropriate here as additional optimization can be performed later without changing behaviour.
Currently, a missing attribute errors on read. This is different to how VEX works, which errors on write but not read.
There should not be a mode for running over inactive voxels. For now, acceptable to include a compile guard to disable this option.
- Andre joining TSC
Ken has reached out to Peter Cucka and Peter agrees to allowing Andre to replace him on the TSC. Motion to make Peter an Emeritus TSC member, update the website, remove him from GitHub OpenVDB group membership and as an OpenVDB code owner. 4 of 5 TSC members approve. Peter not present, but approved offline.
Andre Pradhana accepts the invitation to become a TSC member. Will follow up with DWA leadership.
- Images
ASWF has obtained a few more OpenVDB images from studios, still need more. Andre believes DWA may be able to contribute some new images.
- TAC Survey
Ken has requested an OpenVDB-specific survey to the TAC, as the most useful questions appear late in the ASWF distributed survey.
- VDB Activate SOP
Deactivation is a slow, single-threaded method. Jeff believes it may have existed prior to tools::deactivate() but is in favour of switching it out.
- CSG Intersection Bug
Jeff has reported a bug in the new CSG Intersection method and had to roll back Houdini 18.5 to 7.1 as a result. Dan to investigate and look to release 7.2.2 / 8.0.1 with the bug addressed.
- Inline Half
No objections regarding licensing from TAC.
Lots of questions regarding the correct level of integration of Half. It would be preferrable to be able to swap out an embedded OpenVDB Half implementation with the third-party library to easily test and adopt improvements, however this is not trivial to achieve. Jeff's PR embeds Half in openvdb/math and uses an openvdb::math namespace. This means we are essentially forking the implementation for OpenVDB. Is this a problem? Not much has changed in Half in a long time, though there are ongoing plans to update it. Not simply a matter of changing the namespaces as we also wish to bake the auto-generated lookup table. Half support is coming in C++23, but it will take a long time before we can adopt that. Also, there is potential to switch to using Imath as a math library in the future. Would this affect the decision here? Conversation ongoing on the PR about the right approach to take here.
- Next Meeting
Next meeting is Jan 26th, 2021. 12pm-1pm EST (GMT-5).