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Minutes from 134-th OpenVDB TSC meeting, May 24th, 2022.
Attendees: Jeff L., Nick A, Dan B., Ken M., Andre P., Rich J.
Additional Attendees: Bruce Chernia (Intel), J. T. Nelson (Blender), Karl Marrett (UCLA)
Regrets: None
Agenda:
- Confirm quorum
- Secretary
- Forum
- Wolfram Meeting
- VFX Reference Platform
- 9.1 Release
- Shared_ptr API
- RootNodeMask
- CSG Feature Flag
- Point Replicate
- Next Meeting
- Confirm quorum
Quorum is present.
- Secretary
Secretary is Dan Bailey.
- Forum
a) MIME
Follow up on MIME qs. Nick suggested we contact the organization directly. Ken to look into this.
b) File/Stream API
File and stream APIs do not match grid orders. In the case of the file API, the order is name instead of stream position. This should be addressed, but cannot change behavior in file API to do so. Dan proposes a new getAllGrids() method that we can add to both file and stream API and then mark the incorrect file API method as deprecated. Andre to look into this.
c) No triangles on VolumeToMesh API
VolumeToMesh API only outputs triangles when adaptivity is enabled, however the API does not make this clear and this has resulted in some confusion as both quad and triangle arrays are required as an input by this method. Suggestion is to simply extend the documentation to make this behavior clear.
- Wolfram Meeting
Greg, Nick and Ken met with Wolfram and ASWF. Greg gave a brief demo and explained the intent of the contribution. Primary discussion was around licensing - Wolfram have granted permission to use Mathematica in CI, ASWF legal to review and get back to us on this (expectation is before VDB 10.x in Sep/Oct).
- VFX Reference Platform
Draft proposal for 2023 has been released. Small quibble around the language. Currently OpenVDB is slated as 9.x (unless 10.x is released before end of October). TSC would prefer that the default is 10.x (9.x if not released before end of October). Jeff to reach out to VFX Reference Committee.
- 9.1 Release
31st May deadline, Rich to do the release. Confirm during next TSC meeting.
PDB issue and frustum rasterization outstanding.
- Shared_ptr API
Proposal from Nick about migrating away from an API based heavily on shared pointers in favour of unique pointers. Unique pointers can be trivially converted into shared pointers, but the reverse is not true.
No firm decision, but general agreement on this being worth pursuing. Other APIs introduce the concept of a UPtr to mean unique pointer that would differentiate from our use of Ptr to typically mean shared pointer. Hardest part of this is what to do with the create methods that return a shared pointer by default as this will break the API. Could treat 10.0 as a good point to make this change or to add additional unique pointer methods and deprecate the old ones.
- RootNodeMask
Dan raised that there were a number of areas of the code that were not in active use but primarily kept for backwards-compatibility. In particular, the RootNodeMask offers a runtime defined size. To the best of our knowledge this was only ever a feature in use at Dreamworks and has never actually ended up in use in an official VDB release. Jeff to look at H12.0 and see if it was in use there.
- CSG Feature Flag
Jeff outlined his proposal and the recent changes. No objections to this feature going in.
- Point Replicate
Nick has introduced a new MR for a point replicate feature. It creates new duplicate points over the top of existing points with intention being to be moved into new positions by secondary functionality. Houdini uses VEX under the hood to achieve their equivalent point replication. Jeff highlighted a few features of the Houdini implementation that are worth considering, namely the ability to vary the number of target points generated per source point and the ability to add attributes denoting the source point of each target point and the relative target point for each source point.
- Next Meeting
Next meeting is on May 31st, 2022. 1pm-2pm EDT (GMT-4).