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 (http://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.