Glendale, CA -- DreamWorks Animation SKG and Side Effects Software (sidefx.com) announced plans to integrate OpenVDB (openvdb.org), DreamWorks Animation’s previously proprietary sparse volume data format, into an upcoming release of Side Effect Software’s flagship Houdini software.
“The addition of OpenVDB dramatically expands the volumetric capabilities of Houdini. We are excited about integrating the power of OpenVDB and interested in what can be produced with it in the hands of Houdini artists,” said Kim Davidson, President and CEO of Side Effects Software. “We are pleased to be the first to integrate DreamWorks Animation’s OpenVDB technology.”
“OpenVDB is a significant advancement of the state of the art,” said Dr. Lincoln Wallen, Head of Animation Technology at DreamWorks Animation. “There has been intense industry interest in OpenVDB and we are pleased to be able to share this powerful technology with the animation and visual effects community.”
OpenVDB provides a hierarchical data structure and suite of tools for the efficient manipulation of sparse volumetric data. The Side Effects integration of OpenVDB will include plug-ins and scripts to enable volume creation, editing and interactive display.
DreamWorks Animation began development of OpenVDB several years ago and has extended and improved it over the course of several feature film productions. Within the studio, OpenVDB was rapidly adopted as a key technology for effects on the studio’s recent highly successful films such as Puss in Boots and Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted.
About OpenVDB
OpenVDB is DreamWorks Animation’s recently released, Open Source, sparse volume data format (openvdb.org). OpenVDB stores sparse three-dimensional voxel grids in a compact form. It offers an effectively infinite index space, compact storage in memory and on disk, fast random and sequential data access. Additionally, the release contains a collection of algorithms designed for important operations such as filtering, constructive solid geometry, compositing, sampling and voxelization from other geometric representations. Further details on the technology will be published in a forthcoming paper in the ACM journal Transactions on Graphics.
Source: DreamWorks Animation