Minutes from 97th OpenVDB TSC meeting, June 29th, 2021, (EDT)

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

Additional Attendees: JT Nelson (Blender), Bruce Cherniak (Intel),
Sergio Rojas, Johannes Meng (Intel)


Regrets: *Nick* A.

Agenda:

1) Confirm Quorum
2) Secretary
3) Google Forum
4) NanoVDB
5) 9.0
6) String Grids
7) Example Hip File
8) Next meeting


1) Confirm Quorum

Quorum is present.

2) Secretary

Secretary is Dan Bailey.

3) Google Forum

JT has pointed out that the Google Forum is now longer embedded in the
openvdb.org website. Having discussed the options, it was decided that the best
route is to enable GitHub discussions with a general and a Q&A section as a
replacement for the Google Forum. The Google Forum will not be made read-only,
as there is still a community there which can post and answer questions.
However, there should be a pinned thread highlighting that the TSC members would
be primarily monitoring and responding to questions asked using GitHub
Discussions. It may also be worth posting replies to new topics in the Google
Forum to encourage people to re-post using GitHub Discussions. There is no known
mechanism to extract content from Google Forum and migrate it to GitHub
Discussions. The forum tab of the website should also be updated to provide
clearer guidelines of how to ask questions and to include a link to the old
Google Forum for searching old content.

4) NanoVDB

A couple of big changes have been introduced - a move to 64-bit addressing and
native compression. PNanoVDB is almost ready and has a key benefit that it
supports many more graphics APIs than CNano such as OpenCL.

Autodesk requested relative error bounds instead of absolute error bounds. There
are certain cases where this is useful, so this is being worked on.

Ken to present an overview of NanoVDB at the TSC meeting on Tuesday 13 July and
answer any questions about the library and API. The intention is to submit only
the core library for review initially and not the viewer.

Ken also looking at point quantization currently.

5) 9.0

The VFX Reference Platform has decided on a final deadline of 1st September as
cut-off for inclusion in the VFX Reference Platform 2022. Intention is to
release OpenVDB 9.0 around Siggraph time in order to meet that deadline. There
is discussion ongoing in the TAC meetings about changes that have been made in
how software gets included. Unlikely that NanoVDB would be reviewed and
integrated in time, so may target 9.1.

Dan to reach out to VFX Reference Platform and ask for clarification.

6) String Grids

Ken ok with deleting string grids, believe it was mainly included in the first
place as an example of a non-trivial value type, not a realistic production
type.

7) Example Hip File

Everyone agreed that putting the binary hip file in the openvdb_website Git repo
is acceptable. It's not really best practice of how to use Git, but given that
it changes infrequently and GitHub has restrictions on enabling Git LFS for
hosted websites, there's no suitable alternative.

8) Next meeting

Next meeting is July 13th, 2021. 12pm-1pm EST (GMT-5).
