Request to create sig-assets

[Ulrick28]

Below is a proposed charter to give some idea of what sig-assets would be responsible for. I am primarily looking for the go ahead from the TSC to 1) If we should continue work on forming the sig 2) If the TSC agrees this sig should be created, what are the next steps in getting the sig formally created and approved? If the TSC agrees for the sig to move forward, I will create a PR in the community repo for people to review and suggest changes to the charter.

SIG-Assets Charter

This charter adheres to the Roles and Organization Management specified by the O3DE Foundation. Team information may be found in the README.

Overview of SIG

Sig-Assets oversees the acquisition, storage, and maintenance of O3DE org sanctioned open source licensed assets that can be freely used by the community. Assets can consist of images, sounds, scripts (Lua/ScriptCanvas), 3D models, animations, shaders, levels, terrain, engine demos, and other projects (game jams, feature demos, etc). This sig’s responsibilities include:

• Creating mechanisms and guidelines for contributing open source assets, asset gems, and engine demonstration projects
• Managing asset related GitHub repositories and LFS that stores the files
• Determining if any particular asset or asset creation proposal meets the bar to be included on O3DE asset repositories

Goals

• Ensure any assets that exist in a repo managed by the sig use an appropriate open source license.
• Review and contribute to asset/content/demo roadmaps
• Review asset/demo/content related RFCs and PRs
• Ensure timely and frequent communication of asset activities (including Discord, sig meetings, triage, PR review, RFCs, etc.)
• Provide support to community for asset contribution
• Encourage community contribution of assets
• Work with Sig-Docs-Community and Sig-Release on timing and deliverables of assets
• Work with all sigs on availability of assets for a sig’s specific needs
• Set the quality bar for what can be contributed to official O3DE repositories.
• Ensure that storage of assets stays within allocated budgets

Scope

• Assets such as Models and Meshes, Animations, Skeletal Rigs, Pregenerated Terrain, Textures, Audio, Shaders, Particle Effects, Levels, Asset Gems, Scripts (Lua/ScriptCanvas), Lighting, Camera rigs. Note this is not an exhaustive list of all available asset types. The sig will be responsible for determining and regularly reviewing what assets qualify for inclusion on the repositories.
• Runtime demos with full source and assets (ie a starter game, graphical demos, high quality game jam projects)

Cross-cutting Processes

• Work with Sig-Docs-Community and sig-release on timing and deliverables of assets
• Work with all sigs on availability of assets for a sig’s specific needs
• Work with feature sigs to determine asset deprecation plans when assets are no longer compatible with the engine.

Out of Scope

• Maintaining compatibility with the current version of the engine, though we will report when this is not the case and remove/deprecate assets that do not have an update plan.
• Resolving issues with a particular asset. We will report issues, but are not responsible for addressing them beyond removing or deprecating the asset.

SIG Links and Lists

• Joining this SIG
• Joining Slack/Discord
• Mailing list
• Issues/PRs
• Meeting agenda & notes

Roles and Organization Management

SIG Assets adheres to the standards for roles and organization management as specified by the O3DE Foundation. This SIG opts in to updates and modifications to the Foundation's guidance.

[lmbr-pip]

Consider that SIG/release owns some of this already as we have minimal content in the O3DE/O3DE repository and other repros. As SIG/release is process focused and this is very process focus SIG, you could start as a Working Group within that SIG, rather than making a new SIG and all the heavyweight mechanism that go along with this (charter, staffing, reporting, meetings). I would be clear that we have a need now that currently can't be met.

Name of SIG is hard as it overlaps a lot with SIG/Content, so theres a risk that folks will not know what SIG/asset is (assumption is most likely that it owns asset import).

Finally, you may need to call out if you own code, ie do you own a potential store front for assets or discovery mechanism in code.

[lemonade-dm]

Would SIG-assets(or SIG-demo or SIG-Tutorial) be responsible for driving introduction and research of new Asset formats? I am assuming SIG-Content would be responsible for introducing the import pipeline for that new format. In that case I would believe SIG-Content would be another cross-cutting team that works frequently with SIG-Assets

Also would SIG-Assets become the owners of Asset-Only Gems in the O3DE repos?

Also has @lmbr-pip mentioned about staffing, do we have any volunteers in available to run the SIG-Assets?

[willihay]

Do you envision that written tutorials and other examples that are published in o3de.org could regularly make use of and link to these assets, either by using what's already in the asset repo, or by going through the contribution process to add new assets?

[Ulrick28]

To answer some questions:

• No on asset formats. The pursuit of asset formats is the domain of sig-content
• No new important pipelines (again sig-content)
• Yes for owning asset-only gems that are officially sanctioned by the O3DE org. This sig/committee/working group would be responsible for determining what should/should not be officially sanctioned.
• Yes for docs (or any other sig) making use of assets managed by this sig/committee/working group
• I do not feel sig-release is an appropriate sig for this effort. Primarily as sig-release's mandate is already large and time consuming, and will become increasingly so as we compress the time between releases. I do agree that demos may have some overlap with sig-release mechanisms, though sig-release does not deal with the subjectivity concerning the quality of art/content. Sig-release primarily relies on the other sigs to determine the acceptable quality bar for their features. Sig-release also does zero curation of existing releases. This proposed sig/committee/working group would need to constantly curate (at least on a monthly basis) content to deprecate assets/demos that are no longer relevant/stale/broken. I feel if we needed to put this effort under an existing sig, the sig-docs-community would be a closer fit, primarily as sig-docs-community are already cross cutting and will have the largest vested interest in the success of this effort.
• I am going to propose we rename this effort to sig-demos/demos committee/demos working group. Assets has potential for misinterpretation and overlap with sig-content.

[Ulrick28]

After some discussion, I am going to change the proposal to a demos working group.

[micronAMZN]

Whether this is a SIG or a working group, I'm very interested in volunteering.

[Ulrick28]

@OBWANDO has also volunteered. I'll be involved due to my proximity to content creation in my day job.

[cdomingo]

I am also interested in volunteering!

[adamarjian1]

I am interested in generating 3D assets such as animations and CG models.

[mcphedar]

I'd like to see this working group own the coordination of partners and the community who are building demos for O3DE with the partners/community who have assets they would contribute to an O3DE demo. We will be building demos for some time, so it behooves the O3DF to bring demo creators and asset creators together so we can make great, well-organized demos that feature contributions from our community. I know that know everyone who can contribute assets will, but we do know that some will.

As a demo producer I'd like to be able to come to the Assets working group and say, "We are building a demo to show off a part of the engine, we need assets we can open source. Are there any partners who would be interested in donating assets?" to which they would reply "We have a few partners who will contribute assets. Let me message the rest of the partners and community and see if anyone else will help."