How ZibraAI optimized Unreal for high volumes | Joe Raasch posted on the topic | LinkedIn

Unreal has had VDB support for a little while, but you need to keep the resolution quite low.  I saw some of the people working at ZibraAI post some impressive examples of a plugin they're working on that would let you push the quality of volumes in Unreal really high, so I reached out and asked for a license. It's impressive.  I cached out a few pyro sims from EmberGen that totaled about 30 gigs of data.  I ran that through the ZibraVDB plugin they have for Unreal and it crunched them down to about 1 gig in size. 30 times less!  I loaded the sims into Unreal and yep, they played back in real-time.  Crazy.  The pace of advancements these days is just nuts, you can't even keep up with it. If I have any criticism (and keep in mind that it's an alpha) it's that the fire shading is very basic.  I'm used to having some sort of scattering from the emissive values into the smoke and not having it really hurts the final look. The flame and temperature fields don't give off any emissive values, so I had to fake the indirect light with actual lights.  It also doesn't appear to cast any shadows (at least with my raytracing settings).  Also, for cinematics I render with Temporal samples, and I wasn't sure how to incorporate that with this setup, so no motion blur for me yet. Still, I mean, I'm being a jerk picking at this.  What they've done so far is honestly, amazing. It's great that they're doing this for Unreal, but they should do this for Maya and Houdini too!  Just saving this much time on the I/O and network speeds would be worth it. If you always wanted real volumes in Unreal at high quality, it's worth checking out for sure. | 13 comments on LinkedIn