Real-Time Volumetric Effects in Virtual Production. Now Possible with ZibraVDB

The phrase “game changer” is often used as hyperbole, but in the case of ZibraVDB, it’s not at all far from the truth. When I used to work on optimization for games, every millisecond, every half millisecond mattered. The difference between beautiful-and-shippable and beautiful-but-unshippable is performance. This qualitative threshold lies on a quantitative slider. ZibraVDB changes the game because it suddenly moves us so far along that slider. Its uniquely impressive compression rate, runtime decompression speed, and rendering/lighting quality bring us so much closer to being able to leave 2D volume tricks behind, and to finally enjoy all the visual and gameplay benefits of 3D volumetric FX at runtime. Many virtual production and game projects can already afford this technology, especially when assets can be adjusted based on the frame time and memory budgets. The visual results are particularly striking in cases where smoke interacts with characters, environments, multiple lights, and even other simulations like rigid-body destruction, which is very refreshing to see. On a personal note, I have known the Zibra AI team for the past few years. We collaborated closely on integrating ZibraVDB into Houdini. They are some of the best people I’ve ever worked with. Incredibly intelligent, flexible, and focused on technology. What they’ve built is genuinely a huge step toward the future.

Mai Ao

Senior Technical Lead of SideFX Labs @ SideFX

When new workflow tools come around, it’s common to be disappointed or for vendors to not be able to follow through on promises. That’s certainly not the case with ZibraAI. For the first time, we can now render truly volumetric, animated effects live on volume. This doesn’t just allow for small contained effects like fire or smoke, but also for large scene-scale effects like mist, spindrift or blowing sand. It sets out to solve a long standing problem in realtime graphics, and simply delivers without hype or hyperbole. ZibraVDB was used in basically every scene on a recent shoot and I wouldn’t want to do another ICVFX show without it. The Zibra team are fully behind their product, and are also some of the nicest, most committed developers we’ve worked with.

Alex Jenyon

Digital Environment Supervisor for Virtual Production and LBE, Dimension Studio

Here’s an animated visual comparison of regular heterogenous volumes vs @ZibraAI ZibraVDB in Unreal Engine. Even at only 16% of the size of a standard VDB, ZibraVDB looks as good or better (their VDB shader is pretty awesome).

Aharon Rabinowitz

VFX’er, mographer, filmmaker, software’er.

Big shout-out to the team of unsung heroes who helped me elevating my latest short film “TukTuk Tango” into a love letter to visual effects. A big applause to EmberGen and LiquiGen by JangaFX and to ZibraVDB by Zibra AI . For the longest time I thought that real time fire, water, smoke and explosion simulations are exclusive to experts, simulation gurus and Houdini users. Along come small teams of talented engineers to prove everyone that not only it doesn’t have to be complicated or cumbersome to create stunning visual effects and import them into Unreal Engine with the help of a Zibra AIs genius compression algorithm, this new rendering pipeline can be actually extremely rewarding and fun.

Arthur Baum

DoP & Unreal Engine Artist

phone died during Real Time Live but I meant to mention that @ZibraAI is doing stunningly impressive work in leveraging NNs to compress VDBs for volumetric real-time VFX (Unity/Unreal plugins) and you should most definitely check them out

Michael Becker

Staff Software Engineer @DisneyStudios

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.

Joe Raasch

Head of Training @ Pixomondo