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 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 of the data sets used in our industry.
• 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 “digital backlot” of reusable assets for production, 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

Current Draft License:

Draft License 2021-07-08

License for <Asset Name, e.g. “Moana Island Scene”> (the “Asset Name”).

<Asset Name> Copyright <Year> <Asset Owner>. All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use of these digital assets, with or without modification, solely for education, training, research, software and hardware development, performance benchmarking (including publication of benchmark results and permitting reproducibility of the benchmark results by third parties), or software and hardware product demonstrations, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of these digital assets or any part of them must include the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the disclaimer below.
2. Publications showing images derived from these digital assets must include the above copyright notice.
3. The names of copyright holder or the names of its contributors may NOT be used to promote or to imply endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation with products developed or tested utilizing these digital assets or benchmarking results obtained from these digital assets, without prior written permission from copyright holder.
4. The assets and their output may only be referred to as the Asset Name listed above, and your use of the Asset Name shall be solely to identify the digital assets. Other than as expressly permitted by this License, you may NOT use any trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the copyright holder for any purpose.

DISCLAIMER: THESE DIGITAL ASSETS ARE PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL COPYRIGHT HOLDER BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THESE DIGITAL ASSETS, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.