Minutes from 79th OpenVDB TSC meeting, Feb 9th, 2021, (EDT)

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

Additional Attendees: Johannes Meng (Intel), JT Nelson (Blender),
Bruce Chernaik (Intel), Laura Lediaev (ImageWorks), Robin Rowe (Cinepaint)

Agenda:

1) Confirm Quorum
2) Secretary
3) Forum
4) TSC
5) Half
6) Ken Presentation (first quarter objectives)
7) PRs
8) Extrapolate SOP
9) 7.2.2 / 8.0.1
10) NanoVDB
11) Next meeting

1) Confirm Quorum

Quorum is present.

2) Secretary

Secretary is Nick Avramoussis

3) Forum

Ken to look at issue #943. Nick to upload preliminary docs on issue
management/ labeling.

4) TSC

Andre now officially part of the TSC!

5) Half

Jeff has made a feature branch, Nick's PR #961 is up. Once in, a PR can be made
from the feature branch (feature/inlinehalf) to master. Still missing CI for
build which use Half.

6) Ken Presentation (first quarter objectives)

Ken to present to the TAC on objectives this quarter. These include

 - AX SOP #952
 - Extrapolate SOP #760
 - Merge SOP #623
 - Morphology improvements #754
 - Filter Tiles #843
 - Nano VDB
 - Making more components of boost optional
 - Bumping blosc version

7) PRs

 - AX SOP #952
 - Extrapolate SOP #760
 - Morphology improvements #754
 - Filter Tiles #843

Noted that, on the morphology PR, the activate SOP has *not* been updated.
Additionally, dilation now correctly turns existing leaf nodes which become
dense into active tiles.

8) Extrapolate SOP

#760 Changed to VDB Group params for subset of VDBs to extrapolate. Finds first
fog volume to use an extension field and uses it's background values. Andre to
change some warnings to messages and send Jeff an example scene he is using for
tests.

9) 7.2.2 and 8.0.1

Releases have been complete. New documentation workflow proposed by Dan - docs
are now published to github pages of the openvdb repo (https://academysoftwarefoundation.github.io/openvdb).
Website PR #37 required for this change. PR to start development on 8.0.2 #960
to be approved. Dan and Nick to respond to Emily w.r.t collecting images to
showcase VDB.

10) Update on Nano

Ken is looking at adding in memory compression and updating the node array of
NanoVDB to use offsets rather than exact ids (removing the requirement for nodes
to be sequential). The latter allows for modifications on the GPU and will
require a major version update due to the data layout changing. Also considering
bumping the id/offset value to 64bits - removes the hard 128gb memory limit at
the cost of ~1-2% performance. Ken to do more profiling.

12) Next meeting

Next meeting is Feb 16th, 2021. 12pm-1pm EST (GMT-5).
