Minutes from OpenVDB TSC meeting, January 22th, 2025

Attendees: *Ken* M., *Jeff* L., *Andre* P., *Dan* B., *Greg* H., *Nick* A., *Richard* J.

Additional Attendees: Jonathan Swartz (NVIDIA), Shawn Xiangyu's AI Notetaker

Regrets:

Agenda:

1) Confirm quorum
2) Secretary
3) fVDB separate versioning
4) VDB Siggraph Course
4) New release of fVDB package
5) 12 Release
6) Next Meeting

------------

1) Confirm quorum

Quorum is present.

2) Secretary

Secretary is Greg Hurst.

3) fVDB separate versioning

Is it ok to have a prefix for separate fVDB versions? e.g. fvdb_v0.2.1

Explain the semantic versioning in the documentation. What does it mean? What is major, minor, and patch?

PR 1997 for this 0.2.1 release. Hopefully among the final large monolithic fVDB PRs.

Holding off merging fVDB into master because we can't run GPU's in the CI. To use Amazon codebulder. JSwarz to attend next CI working group meeting.

OpenColorIO does have GPUs in their runners, so to learn what they do too.

4) TAC meeting

New & upcoming features to talk about.

V12, fVDB, 3 releases per year, changed the license and no longer support gcc 9 and ABI 0

pybind 11 and pip install openvdb

Release at the end of February
- Levelset tapered tube.

- Anisotropic surfaces.

- Half Grid support:
    - Need to take out `ComputeType` template from the Grid and Tree class.
    - Need to fix unit tests.
    - Need to cleanup the current `feature/half_grid_support` to pass the CI.

- Fix clang template errors (contributed by Dhruv Govil).
This is [PR-1977](https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openvdb/pull/1977). It is already merged in.

- LevelSet Fillet
    - Rename it to OpenVDB_SDF_Blend.
    - Add unit test for it.
    - Change the license

5) Half progress

Half rebase on master and 3 half grid commits. 1 more commit to fix unit tests. Then move ComputeType out of the grid & tree.

6) Siggraph course

google doc with initial ideas: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PiCfi5slMoA3S6bcJdxI8rvGJoQps7QzKeic9LKP-xs/edit

Proposal:

* Nano
  * MPM in Houdini <- Alexandre
  * NanoVDB Advances <- Ken

* ƒVDB <- Jonathan, Francis, Matthew, Efty, Mark, et al?
  * Intro
  * 3D Segmentation
  * Simulation

* Coding
  * Capsules <- Greg
  * 16 Bit Grids <- Greg
  * OpenVDB Iterators, Parallel Patterns, etc <- Dan

Try to have all speakers guarantee we can distribute the recording. Or split out propriatary demos?

Should there be a separate course for fVDB? Probably 1 course but let's see the ideas beforehand.

A nice slow step-by-step hello world example for fVDB would be wildly valuable.

Let's try to estimate how long each person's slot will be.

Anisotropic surfacing? <- Nick
Dilation of active values? <- Dan

What about volume rendering talk? MoonRay? Arnold?

1 long course or 2 short courses?

7) Next Meeting

Next Meeting 02-05-2025 at the same time.
