Mission and Goals

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

• These are not intended as training assets, nor as “best practices” examples. On the contrary, ideally they exhibit some of the variety and warts of production data. (They may still be valuable for education.)
• This is not a “digital backlot” of reusable assets for production, nor a marketplace for personal projects. It is tightly curated. The license terms do not permit reuse for creative projects.
• 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.

Approach

• Encouraging contributions
• 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.
• Maintain a Wish List gathers requests and specifications from ASWF projects.
• To do: Establish criteria for acceptance. Establish a curating mechanism.
• To do: Create an ASWF seal of approval for an asset, as being representative of current film production scale and content. Since film production evolves over time, this approval will carry a date, and may be renewed as appropriate.
• License
  • The ASWF Digital Assets License balances the concerns of asset donors and asset consumers.
• Publishing
  • To do: Set up public access at http://assets.aswf.io (or similar).
  • Where it is valuable and practical, ASWF can host the actual files (which may be large). Details TBD.
• Formats and Maintenance
• 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. This can take substantial 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.
• File formats evolve. Establish procedures to version and maintain the assets.
• To do: Life cycle. Establish criteria/procedure for retiring assets.

Meeting notes

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