Purpose

Describe the purpose of the group in no more that 4-5 sentences.

The ASWF Assets Working Group is tasked with coming up with a clear strategy for how the ASWF might curate and host some set of digital assets that are of value to both our software projects and the larger development community we serve.

This group needs to decide on a framework for what those assets might be, where we might get them, and decided on the initial process of acquiring and hosting them.

Goals

Goals are the distinct outcomes that is are to be anticipated from the working group, serving as a method for validating activities.

In order to encourage development and research that addresses the true scale, scope and requirements of computer graphics film production, the ASWF Asset Repository seeks to:

• Publish curated exemplars Exemplars of the data sets used in our industry and by our software projects entry level/educational assets as well complex production grade assets?.
• Lower any barriers to contributions, especially from studios.
• In particular, recommend a uniform licensing agreement.
• Maintain these exemplars to be useful as:
• Test sets for ASWF projects and other open source projects;
• Robustness and conformance tests for software authors, including commercial software vendors; and
• Inspiration and illustration for research. This could include aspirational data sets too difficult to use in production.
• Examples available for use in presentations, documentation, and marketing materials.

Non-Goals

Non-goals are things that the working group are intentionally choosing not to do, the things not expected to change due to the working groups efforts, or the subject matter areas that the working groups doesn’t want to address at this time.

• These are not intended as educational assets, nor as “best practices” examples. On the contrary, ideally they exhibit some of the variety and warts of production data.
• This is not a backlot “digital backlot” of reusable assets for productionnot a dumping ground (i.e. we will curate the collection, not allow just anyone to put something there), nor a marketplace for personal projects. It is tightly curated.
• These are not complete conformance tests nor regression test suites for open source projects. Maintenance of such test suites is best left to the individual projects.

Deliverables

provide a list of planned deliverables, or links to the deliverables. A best practice is to have a directory named deliverables in the repo for hosting and managing deliverables.

• Encourage and engage with major studios to publish complex film production assets.
• To fill in gaps of coverage, engage with non-studio film producers such as Blender Foundation.
• Make it easy:
• Licenses: Provide a consistent license or very small set of licenses. Currently ASWF legal is setting up a meeting w/Governing Board representatives and their legal representatives.
• Hosting: TBD where it is valuable and practical for ASWF to host the actual files (which may be large).
• Make it clear:
• Wish list: Gather requests and specifications from ASWF projects.
• Establish criteria for acceptance. Establish a curating mechanism.
• Consider creating an ASWF seal of approval for an asset, as being representative of current film production scale and content. Over time, film production evolves; renew this approval as appropriate.
• Make it useful:
• Initially, the studio may present the asset(s) in any publicly readable format.
• Subsequently, it may be valuable to conform the asset to open file formats, but this can be a large effort. Coordinate with the studio, community, and possibly ASWF interns to do this.
• In general there are two kinds of assets: “warts and all” production assets, which are great for testing robustness of software, and “clean and portable” assets, which are great for getting started, and for research projects.
• Over time, file formats evolve. Establish procedures to version and maintain the assets.

Meeting notes

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HuxNSlV6fS_3km6QlwA5Z9oBhNgx_NlhZjV2jg2DrFg/edit