Production release of OpenVDB v3.2

[Ken Museth]

We're finally published a production release of OpenVDB v3.2.

Highlights:

• New features: tool to produce and store a sequences of progressively lower resolution grids (mipmaps), an acceleration structure for fast range and nearest-neighbor searches on particles, arbitrary volume and level set specific segmentation tools, a new binary mask grid type and an efficient point to level set conversion scheme.
• Optimizations: Faster volume to mesh conversion and threaded grid destruction, morphological dilation, csg operations and fracture tool.
• New Houdini nodes: Segment, LOD and Topology To Level Set.

For more details see the release notes.


-K

[Steven Caron]

Congratulations guys, it is a great release with a lot of useful functionality.

Here is a WIP fork of some Windows changes, a CMake build system, and building on Appveyor (Windows CI)

https://github.com/caron/openvdb/tree/v3.2.0-win-appveyor

The most recent build has a package which can be downloaded now, no Maya or Houdini plugins though.

https://ci.appveyor.com/project/caron/openvdb/build/v3.2.0-win-appveyor-65/artifacts

I hope in the future we can see support for Travis CI and Appveyor accepted back into the official repository.

Steven

P.S. TestParticleAtlas crashes for me on Windows. If anyone on Windows could download the build and run "openvdb_test -v" and let me know if it crashes for them?

[Joshua Olson]

Thank you for the build, Steven. At first most crashes for me happened around TestParticleAtlas, with Windows (10, admin account) offering to debug or terminate due to an uncaught win32 exception. In all but one of those cases the application windows logs in Event Viewer give exception code 0xc0000005 and fault offset 0x000000000051c91d. One of my cases had fault offset 0x000000000051c913.

Other runs, most of them later ones, continue past TestParticleAtlas (default 'F', verbose 'struct TestParticleAtlas::testParticleAtlas : assertion') but at TestPointsToMask freezes my desktop and affects cursor responsiveness. I'm not sure if any logged events I see refer to when this happens, but I have to hard shutdown. Could be a Windows bug too.

[Steven Caron]

Hey Joshua

I am glad you got to access the build and verified it works for the most part! I had to take a break from the appveyor and cmake build work but feel free to fork it and improve it and make some pull requests. I made this available for Dreamworks/SideFX also so I could show them my crash and maybe provide some way to reproduce it?

I have two other tasks I want to do on this. First, I want to explore creating releases which post to GitHub whenever a release tag is made. Second, I want to speed up the build by pre-compiling the dependencies. Starting with ILMBase and OpenEXR dependcies, by forking that repo, setting up appveyor on that project, then just download that for the OpenVDB build instead of building entirely from scratch each time.

Steven

[Joshua Olson]

I forked the AppVeyor build to see what I can diagnose. Another cross-platform build option is something like git submodules - there could be other old repos with a similar approach, and of course the pegged dependency commits would need to be updated.

[Joshua Olson]

By the way, Steven, would you prefer a forum thread to discuss the build process's warnings (OpenVDB's code has to compile without them), or enabling Issues for your fork?

[Steven Caron]

I went ahead and enabled issues on my fork.