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

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

I had the privilege of experiencing a live demo working like a charm in Zibra AI’s head office. I requested one of their tech artists Dmytro Kucherenko to quickly run a new high-res pyro sim in Houdini, cache it out, and import it into Unreal using their UE in-editor VDB compression tool—just to see the process in action… Within minutes since we started, the same high-res simulation was running smoothly in UE5 at an incredible frame rate. The compressed VDB sequence was also only a small fraction of the original cache in size.

Mai Ao

Senior Technical Lead of SideFX Labs @ SideFX

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