Production release of OpenVDB 9.0.0

[Ken Museth]

We're excited to announce the release of OpenVDB version 9.0.0. Highlights of this major release include:

• NanoVDB, which offers GPU support
• Improved compilation times
• Support for OpenEXR version 3
• Transient (e.g. blind) data in tree nodes
  

See the release notes for a complete list of changes:

Version 9.0.0 - October 29, 2021

This version introduces ABI changes relative to older major releases, so to preserve ABI compatibility it might be necessary to define the macro OPENVDB_ABI_VERSION_NUMBER=N, where, for example, N is 7 for Houdini 18.5 and 8 for Houdini 19.0.

Official release of NanoVDB, which for the first time offers GPU support for static sparse volumes in OpenVDB. See the documentation for details.

Faster build times from support for explicit template instantiation, which is enabled by default for most of the tools.

Added support for OpenEXR 3. This is contributed by Cary Phillips.

Added transient data to the RootNode, InternalNode, and LeafNode.

New features:

• NanoVDB, which for the first time offers GPU support for static sparse volumes in OpenVDB.

Improvements:

• Added tools::countActiveLeafVoxels(), tools::countInactiveVoxels(), tools::countInactiveLeafVoxels() and tools::activeTiles() to perform multi-threaded counting. The Tree methods now use these implementations.
• Moved from the deprecated TBB task scheduler to TBB arenas. Various methods now respect the TBB arena state they were invoked from.
• Introduced a new thread/Threading.h header to consolidate calls to third-party threading methods.
• Minor performance improvements to dilation calls in fast sweeping algorithms.
• Added hsvtogrb() and rgbtohsv() AX helper functions for converting hue, saturation and value inputs to RGB values and vice-versa.
• PointDataGrid conversion can now be performed using 32-bit float arrays.
• Improved support for size_t grid types on systems where size_t is a unique type. [Contributed by Brecht Van Lommel]
• Add support for dilation in one direction and extending a field in one direction in fast sweeping algorithms.
• Added PNG support to vdb_render which can be enabled with during CMake with -DUSE_PNG=ON.
• Explicit template instantiation has been enabled by default for most of the tools. This pre-compiles template instantiations into the core library to reduce the time spent compiling code in downstream libraries or applications.
• Added a python binding for OpenVDB AX which allows you to invoke accelerated AX code from the python module.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug where ax::run() would crash if it could not parse a single statement.

ABI changes:

• Added transient data to the RootNode, InternalNode, and LeafNode.

API changes:

• DynamicNodeManager can now set one grain size for threading across leaf nodes and another for threading across non-leaf nodes.
• StringGrid and StringTrees are deprecated.
• The NullInterrupter is now a virtual base class to help reduce compile-time instantiation cost.

Houdini:

• Fix crash in VDB Combine in Copy B mode if the second input has more VDBs than the first.
• VDB Vector Merge SOP is now VDB Vector From Scalar SOP to distinguish it from the VDB Merge SOP. It keeps the same internal name so this is merely a label change.
• Add option to pass in OPENVDB_DSO_NAMES to CMake to configure which Houdini DSOs are compiled.
• VDB Activate SOP now has an option for the expansion pattern to use for dilation.
• The label for Voxels to Expand is now Expand Voxels to match Houdini.
• Fix bug to allow VDB LOD SOPs to be chained together.
• SOP Extrapolate supports dilation in one direction and extending a field in one (domain) direction.
• The default OpenVDB ABI is now 8 for Houdini versions > 18.5.
• VDB Visualize Tree SOP is now multi-threaded and provides slicing and color remapping.
• A new HoudiniInterrupter has been added that derives from the NullInterrupter and the Interrupter is now deprecated. All the SOPs have been updated to use the new HoudiniInterrupter.
• Add a sanitizer in SOP OpenVDB Extrapolate when expanding a narrow-band level-set with a dilation value of 0, which will result in no operation.

Build:

• Added support for TBB 2021.
• Enabled the OPENVDB_FUTURE_DEPRECATION variable by default to warn on upcoming deprecations.
• Introduced a OPENVDB_DOXYGEN_INTERNAL CMake variable which is ON by default and removes the majority of internal namespaces from the generated doxygen.
• Improved the doxygen deprecation listings, folder layouts and fixes issues when using later versions of doxygen.
• Build fixes for MinGW on Windows. [Contributed by Brecht Sanders]
• Added support for OpenEXR 3. [Contributed by Cary Phillips]
• Added an OPENVDB_NAMESPACE_SUFFIX CMake string option which provides the ability to customise the VDB namespace.
• The Python Module now appends the base directory defined by Python_SITELIB to the default install path (typically dist-packages or site-packages). [Contributed by Ignacio Vizzo]
• As of this release, VFX Reference Platform 2019 is no longer supported. CMake now issues deprecation warnings for 2020 VFX Reference Platform version dependencies.
• Build fixes for OpenVDB AX with C++17 and greater.
• Bumped the new blosc version future minimum to 1.17.0.
• OpenEXR is now optional for vdb_render. It can be enabled with -DUSE_EXR=ON.