Siggraph is a special time of year for the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF). Announced at the conference in 2018, ASWF is focused on promoting and aiding open software development for the creative community. This year, the foundation is hosting its annual Open Source Days, which will unofficially kick off the Siggraph conference in Denver. Attendance, on-site or virtually, at Open Source Days is free. Also, ASWF has announced Version 1.5 of OpenFX, the plug-in standard for interoperability among image processing tools in the VFX industry (in incubation at ASWF), with the full release of v.1.5 expected later this summer.
The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) has been around for six years now and continues to expand and grow. It was announced during Siggraph 2018, to aid and promote open software development for the creative community. It was founded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AMPAS), and heading up the initiative was ILM’s Rob Bredow, well-known in the visual effects industry and the Academy. Hosting the AWSF effort is the Linux Foundation.
With its roots (and many members) in the Siggraph community, ASWF has been hosting its annual Open Source Days to coincide with the computer graphics conference. This year, the event will be held on Sunday, July 28, in Denver, the location of Siggraph 2024. Open Source Days is free for those attending the event either on-site or virtually (registration is required), and will feature discussions from VFX/animation studios, software vendors, and other professionals regarding open-source projects, best practices, and the latest updates to popular open-source projects. The foundation will also host Birds of a Feather sessions on Monday, July 29, at Siggraph (those sessions require a Siggraph registration).
Animal Logic’s Darin Grant will deliver the keynote, titled The Value of Serial Volunteerism, during the Open Source Days event. Executives from Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Blender, Framestore, Maxon, Weta FX, and others will also speak. The schedule for both days can be found here.
To date, the ASWF has hosted a number of projects, adopting five of them: Open Shading Language, OpenColorIO, OpenCue, OpenEXR, and OpenVDB. Seven other projects are in incubation—DPEL, MaterialX, OpenFX, OpenImageIO (OIIO), OpenTimelineIO, Raw to Aces Utility, and Rez. There are also two projects at the sandbox stage: Open Review Initiative and OpenAssetIO.
This week, the ASWF announced OpenFX Version 1.5 of the plug-in standard for interoperability among image processing tools in the VFX industry, making it easier to access a variety of tools for VFX apps, editing, and video processing, all with little or no modification required. OpenFX was developed in 2004 and adopted into the foundation in 2022.
The full release of this updated plug-in version, which will be available later this summer, contains a suite of new features for streamlining workflows. These include enhanced color management APIs, comprehensive GPU support between hosts and plug-ins (such as OpenCL, CUDA, and Metal), future compatibility with Windows Arm64, support for SideFX Houdini Version 20.5, and more. The pre-release of Version 1.5 is available in the OpenFX GitHub Repository.