3.6 KiB
Minutes from 118th OpenVDB TSC meeting, January 25th, 2022, (EDT)
Attendees: Ken M., Jeff L., Andre P, Nick A., Dan B., Rich J.
Additional Attendees: Sebastian Gaida, Greg Hurst (United Therapeutics), Bruce Cherniak (Intel), JT Nelson (Blender), Sergio Rojas (Different Dimension).
Regrets:
Agenda:
- Confirm quorum
- Secretary
- Forum
- Level Set Propagation
- Half VDBs
- Roadmap
- Next meeting
- Confirm quorum
Quorum is present.
- Secretary
Secretary is Dan Bailey.
- Forum
Discussion on Google groups about deep merging point trees. Author of the post shared some interesting context about their application and provided some feedback and details about the type of datasets that were tried. Dan to investigate performance regarding his merging implementation. Nick thinks we should consider accepting his deep merge implementation.
Issue 1287 - we should investigate if the proposed solution is worth implementing.
PR 1282 - Ken to try this suggested change out and reply with his feedback. Greg mentioned that he ran into the same issue recently and will help review.
Discussion 1286 - Question about distributing a compiled Python module. Someone should reply to this, but we don't have time or knowledge to look into doing this right now.
- Level Set Propagation
Ken has a new tool to do level set propagation, will share shortly.
- Half VDBs
Greg has been looking at adding half grids as a native runtime type. Various changes required, some more hacky as proof of concept, but it is working. Some discussion around what precision to do computation at, whether to promote to double for example and then lower to half for in-memory storage. Computing natively at half is slower. API and tools are not very consistent about this, but this is more forgiving with float and double than with half, so this issue will need to be resolved.
Possibility of using a compression type. Jeff highlighted that something similar is done with Houdini volumes, where constant tiles can be stored with a compressed type different from the volume type.
- Roadmap
Live discussion and updates to the roadmap, see this document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F1hmGnS1kIMobnfgpTJ6SYSrEPhC2B0WQAlt-idAo5w/edit?usp=sharing
Of particular note during this discussion:
6a) MultiResGrid - no major progress on this front recently, but worth discussing with Autodesk and making a final call on whether this is something we can pursue or not. 6b) PointRasterize - Nick's implementation for point rasterizing has languished on a PR for a while. Contention is around how to include multiple similar but different tools. Rasterization is a complex and multi-faceted problem. No reason not to add more than one similar tool, but general agreement that the current practice of having tools self-documented in header files would make this harder to navigate and more confusing. Nick highlighted that we should really improve our documentation and rely more on well-written Doxygen or Sphinx to help our users. Ken suggested that we could introduce new translation units which would make the header files simpler and easier to navigate, though this has implications for explicit template instantiation. Other suggestions include having a single entry header (PointRasterize.h) which pulled in all other implementations. Nick pointed at other libraries that use a detail namespace for better abstracting implementation detail away from the user. Dan to review Nick's PR with a view to merge this in shortly.
- Next meeting
Next meeting is in one week, February 1st, 2022. 1pm-2pm EST (GMT-5).