OpenVDB: An Open Source Data Structure and Toolkit for High-Resolution Volumes

Guest Lecture | February 26, 2015 | 3:30-5:00 p.m. | 190 Doe Library, UC Berkeley
Speaker: Ken Museth, Manager and Senior Principal Engineer of Research and Development, DreamWorks Animation
Sponsors: Berkeley Institute for Data Science
VDB is an C++ library comprising a novel hierarchical data structure and a suite of tools for the efficient storage, rendering, and manipulation of sparse volumetric data discretized on three-dimensional grids. Following the open sourcing of VDB (www.openvdb.org) at SIGGRAPH 2012 and Houdini's full integration of OpenVDB since version 12.5, this presentation is targeting both developers who seek insight into the novel data structure and new adopters who simply wish to experiment with the new technology. OpenVDB ships with a rich toolset of high-level volumetric processing and conversion tools that can be applied directly in VFX pipelines. To this end, the presentation will focus on the following aspects of VDB: a technical description of its underlying data structure and algorithms; its accompanying toolset; and, finally, its integration into Houdini as a first-class citizen.
OpenVDB and its predecessor VDB have to date been used in more than 70 feature movies, including all of the movies being nominated for an Oscar for the best visual effects in 2015. The talk is delivered by VDB’s inventor, Ken Museth, and takes point of reference in a technical paper presented at SIGGRAPH 2013.

[@sparshpriyadarshi]

Need this for nanovdb too

[@jmcllinux]

Thank you for sharing ...Really interesting lecture & structure!!!

[@danielkrajnik3817]

Rip ears 41:03

[@rajanikanthj]

Thank you. This is a very useful presentation.

[@vfxpipeline]

Thanks for sharing. very good.

[@mariahmills3991]

Please can someoone help with how install OpenVDB in maya

[@danielkrajnik3817]

thank you Ken, this is amazing. One note at 12:10 I hear "infinitely large" used a lot, but I assume that it still allows you to choose precision, right? Float, double or does it always scale out?

[@dapper-alien]

I don't think the bitwise operations would work the same with floating point numbers ( i bet you could modify them, but they wouldn't be as fast ). I think your range is probably limited to your hardware's architecture, so if you had 64 bit, you get the entire space of signed 64 bit numbers... generally with 'real' data, you want to use integer, fixed point or simply scale your data by a float, floating point causes precision issues when you start representing very large domains.
*disclaimer, I am a disembodied comment on the internet and by no means an expert lol

[@DanHaiduc]

Is it really O(1) lookup? I would have guessed O(log n), like regular trees.

[@klystron2010]

Dan Haiduc With n fixed to 4, it becomes O(1).

[@anilkumarsingh3241]

th-cam.com/video/7hUH92xwODg/w-d-xo.html

[@rajanikanthj]

I had the same question. Does make sense after a while. Looks like a hash table for 3 dimensions and a tree structure blended together.

[@DeVRJB]

I am just here because of Margot Robbie!