Minutes from 106th OpenVDB TSC meeting, September 28th, 2021, (EDT)

Attendees: *Ken* M., *Dan* B., *Nick* A., *Jeff* L., *Andre* P.

Additional Attendees: JT Nelson (Blender), Richard Jones (DNeg),
Johannes Meng (Intel)

1) Confirm Quorum
2) Secretary
3) CI Issue that OpenVDB is having
4) Forum
5) NanoVDB 
6) SIGGRAPH Feedback
7) OpenVDB v9
8) OpenEXR v3
9) Mathematica
10) Next Meeting 

1) Confirm Quorum

Quorum is present.

2) Secretary

Secretary is Andre Pradhana.


Nick mentions that there is a lot of discussion on NanoVDB. Ken will take a
look.

3) CI Issue

Dan mentions that there are some CI issues with the Houdini CI. This problem
is due to not setting the RPATH in pyOpenVDB component; it's because when you
find package BLOSC, it is finding it from the Houdini DSO Lib directory. But
that find package call is only happening inside the OpenVDB core library
cmake, which is not happening at the right level. Nick will take a look at
this, especially if the find package calls makes sense to live at the top
level.

4) Forum

Nick mentions that there are a few NanoVDB related issues/requests on the github
issues.

5) NanoVDB

Ken created a PR. He did what we talked about before. It's trying to merge into
feature/nanovdb, instead of master. Nick says that it looks good, but he
mentions that more care is needed from the fact that the NanoVDB viewer is
included in that feature branch. Ken mentions that he and Jeff see that the
viewer offers an advantage in that it shows people how they can adopt NanoVDB
in their project and that it serves as an example project. The viewer is
working out-of-the box in its current version, but since the build-system
for NanoVDB is going to change (by the fact that we are trying to make
the build system for NanoVDB and the rest of the OpenVDB projects to be
more aligned), he sees that making the build-system to also work with the
viewer is a tall order.

At the end, we decided to make a new PR based on feature/nanovdb_merge_candidate
and to leave feature/nanovdb alone. We then go back to fix feature/nanovdb.

6) SIGGRAPH

Ken says that it's a very good feedback from SIGGRAPH regarding the OpenVDB
course. There is one comment he finds really interesting: someone says that
the presentation is great, but he wants to know how to use the library. The
commenter is suggesting a course on programming. Nick mentions that Dan's
presentation is related to this request. Ken mentions that Dan's course is
more geared towards an expert's perspective on how to accomplish something
efficiently, instead of answering, "How do I do anything?" Jeff mentions that
it is similar to a course on how to use an API. Nick, Dan, and Jeff suggest
that providing an example in the library.

OpenVDB has a lot of unit tests that acts as examples. NanoVDB comes with
a lot of examples. Ken thinks that we should do the same for OpenVDB. Ideally,
we should update the cook-book.

7) OpenVDB v9

The root-offset. Ken has not made any progress on that. He will look at it.

Dan talks about explicit template instantiation, this is PR-1182. It is
working on Windows. The cmake is all there. He did one test with Activate.h. 
He is hoping to get sign-off on this.

Dan gives an overview of the PR by sharing screen. He needs to remove inline
statements from the tools. It boils down making a single macro call. Jeff
suggests that we need to have undef in the define macro in Activate.h.

Nick makes a comment that cmake should generate the .cc files, instead of
make. We can use cmake files method to write the files. Nick suggests Dan
to take a look at execute_process command in cmake. The plan is to put it
in v9. Once this PR is approved, Dan will make another PR to invoke this
mechanism for all the tools.

8) OpenEXR 3

There is a lot of back-on-forth with the OpenEXR team. Nick mentions that
it looks fine. The more annoying to have a hash-define.

9) Mathematica

Ken has a meeting with a company that is doing 3D-printing. They have integrated
OpenVDB into Mathematica. They are still stuck on the CLI part, but once they
sign that, they want to contribute back. It may end up as a module, like Maya or
Houdini. Ken wants to invite them.

10) Next Meeting

Next meeting is October 5th, 2021. 12pm-1pm EST (GMT-5).
