ZibraVDB
Experience Dynamic Volumetric Real-Time Effects with ZibraVDB
ZibraVDB compresses
OpenVDB effects, allowing real-time rendering in game engines by reducing data size up to 100 times. This enables high-quality 3D visuals in Unreal Engine 5.
Real-Time VDB Mastery
ZibraVDB for Virtual Production
Transform your on-set workflow with real-time volumetric effects
Realistic Effects:
Immersion:
Enhanced Control:
Unmatched Performance:
Unleash Real-Time VFX for Immersive Gaming
ZibraVDB for Gaming
Elevate your game's visual experience with dynamic volumetric VFX.
Instant Changes:
long rebaking loops for 2D flipbooks.
Efficient Compression:
space due to up to x150 compression rate.
Optimal Performance:
platform you use
Full power of VDB. At your fingertips
Next-Level VFX Power
Optimize VFX easily with full performance control
Easy VFX optimization
Speed, Compression, and Quality Combined
Dramatic asset size reduction: up to 100x compression rate
Custom volumetric rendering component 3x faster than competing solution
Full control on performance and quality
Ease of use: VFX flow for every Unreal Engine user
ZibraVDB for Houdini
Compress VDB sequences, saving up to 100x on size
GPU/CPU compression and decompression
Render farm support
Full power of VDB. At your fingertips
Next-Level VFX Power
Optimize VFX easily with full performance control
Create Real-Time VFX for Virtual Production
Integrate and adjust volumetric VFX on LED walls in real-time
Eliminate post-production compositing to enhance efficiency
Combustion
Use real-time volumetric VFX for dynamic live performances
Captivate audiences with breathtaking natural and fantasy effects
Elevate Game Cinematics
Replace flat flipbooks with immersive volumetric VFX
Create realistic effects like tornadoes and storm clouds in real-time
Overcome Hardware Limitations
Compress VDB volumes up to 100 times, bypassing VRAM constraints and bandwidth bottleneck
Render high-quality volumetric VFX on standard hardware with ease
Through the grapevine
Trusted by creatives from all over the world
Discover reviews and feedback from industry leaders
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
ZibraVDB FAQ
Frequently
asked questions
Find answers to common questions about ZibraVDB, including installation, features, and troubleshooting tips.
What is ZibraVDB and how it works?
ZibraVDB is compression and real-time rendering technology for VDB sequences. It lets you compress an entire sequence into a single .zibravdb file and decompress frames in real-time on demand. With our superfast decompression, you can overcome bandwidth bottlenecks, and our custom volumetric renderer provides realistic results at a low cost. Compression, decompression, and rendering utilize GPU for maximum performance.
How is ZibraVDB different from NeuralVDB or NanoVDB?
The goal of ZibraVDB is not just to reduce size, but to enable real-time rendering of large VDB sequences. This is possible because of our real-time decompressor and custom volumetric renderer optimized specifically for this type of data. With ZibraVDB, you can load the entire compressed sequence into memory and decompress the needed frame on demand. This is much faster than loading each frame from the disk.
How is ZibraVDB different from Unreal’s Heterogeneous Volumes?
Foremost, ZibraVDB is twice as fast as Heterogeneous Volumes in terms of rendering and importing speed. Additionally, ZibraVDB allows you to render large sequences, like 80GB, in real-time, while Unreal Engine crashes even when importing a 10GB sequence. ZibraVDB is also much easier to use; you simply drag and drop your effect into the scene, and it works with no additional setup needed!
ZibraVDB also integrates with Heterogeneous Volumes for those who still require it. You’ll benefit from a faster importing process and support for large effects. However, the rendering speed will be much slower compared to using the custom ZibraVDB renderer.
How much the size of the VDB sequence can be reduced?
This depends a lot on the effect itself and how much detail you want to preserve. On average, you can get 40x compression without noticeable quality loss. With our upcoming temporal compression, you’ll be able to reach a 150x compression rate.
What maximum size of the VDB sequence can I use in real-time?
This depends on the size of your largest frame in the sequence. After decompressing this frame, it should fit into your VRAM while still leaving some space for the compressed sequence and rendering resources. You can even compress and render a 1TB effect if it has many frames that aren't too large. ZibraVDB also makes additional optimizations for single-frame VDB (e.g., clouds) or single-channel sequences, allowing you to render frames larger than 2GB. Be aware, though, that rendering frames with billions of voxels can be quite expensive.
How much realism can I get with ZibraVDB?
ZibraVDB renderer is designed for maximum speed. It also has advanced features like projected shadows, precise reflections, and can support illumination from up to 15 different lights. Realism largely depends on how you direct your effects and integrate them into the scene. Note that we don’t have light scattering for now. It’s better to bake all emission in the volume to the temperature channel if you want to import your complex shaded effects from Houdini. ZibraVDB also integrates with Heterogeneous Volumes, which is useful if you want to use Path Tracing with ZibraVDB for maximum quality.
Does ZibraVDB support the compression of particle cache stored in VDB format?
No, VDB is not the best way to store particle data efficiently. However, we do plan to create a solution for compressing particles and geometry.
Stay tuned
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