ZibraGDS can support millions of polygons per frame and thousands of frames per sequence. Compression achieves an 80–92% reduction in data size, depending on the characteristics of the input mesh sequence. Assets import 3–4x faster than with existing techniques, and rendering (including decompression) is at least 5–10x faster than existing solutions.

ZibraGDS is best suited for high-resolution animated mesh sequences that are traditionally too heavy or too complicated to bring into real-time engines, especially fluids, destruction, growth simulations, 3D motion graphics, and other types of artistic designs and visualizations.

Yes. ZibraGDS works seamlessly with ZibraVDB, Zibra AI's volumetric compression and rendering solution, allowing artists to author complex, two-way coupled simulations involving volumes and meshes and combine the effects in a real-time scene.

Yes. ZibraGDS exposes compression quality controls for individual attributes. It also provides options for recomputing normals, computing tangents, generating motion vectors, removing duplicate faces, and applying transform adjustments during compression. For playback, artists can choose whether to load compressed frames into VRAM, stream from RAM, or stream from disk.

ZibraGDS imports Alembic (.abc) files. Only meshes with triangles and quads as polygons are supported. Topology is compressed losslessly, while other attributes (positions, normals, UVs, vertex colors, and velocities) use efficient lossy compression with per-attribute quality controls.

Get a license key at zibra.ai/zibragds, then go to Tools > ZibraGDS > Open License Settings in Unreal Engine and enter your key in the License Key field. A "License successfully verified" notification confirms activation.

In Unreal Engine, go to Tools > ZibraGDS > Compress Alembic File, choose your Alembic file in the File Path parameter, optionally adjust Compression Settings, and press Compress. The compressed ZibraGDS asset appears in your Content folder. We recommend keeping the default Quality values and adjusting only if you notice unacceptable quality degradation.

Three streaming methods let you balance performance against memory: “None” loads all compressed frames to VRAM for the best performance; “From RAM” keeps compressed frames in RAM and streams to VRAM; “From Disk” streams compressed frames from disk through RAM to VRAM, with configurable frames-ahead and frames-behind buffers. Playback controls include frame rate, speed multiplier, start frame, and frame interpolation for constant-topology geometry. ZibraGDS is also fully integrated with Unreal Level Sequences.

ZibraGDS for UE 0.7 supports Unreal Engine 5.3 through 5.8. On Windows, it requires D3D12 with Shader Model 6 (SM6) and the latest Visual C++ Redistributable.

Yes. ZibraGDS output integrates into the engine's native lighting, rendering, and material pipelines, with support for Lumen, ray tracing, path tracing, ray-traced shadows, virtual shadow maps, Substrate materials, lighting channels, custom depth/stencil, and translucency sorting. Motion blur is supported via the velocity attribute.

Nanite is primarily aimed at static geometry and certain animated mesh workflows, while ZibraGDS is focused on animated mesh sequences, especially real-time VFX where topology, attributes, streaming, and per-frame geometry changes create additional challenges.

Version 0.7 added several workflow and rendering improvements, including a Reimport button, a custom Sequencer playback track, a ZibraGDS asset editor, support for up to 3 UV channels, velocity generation for constant-topology geometry, tangent computation during import and runtime, custom depth and stencil support, translucency sorting, speed multiplier properties, lighting channels, automatic triangulation for N-gons, several Alembic import fixes, RAM/disk streaming options, and optimized VRAM footprint.

Future 1.0+ versions of ZibraGDS will have backward compatibility among themselves. Unfortunately, compressed assets created with 0.7 will not work with future 1.0+ versions due to planned file format improvements. Please consider keeping a copy of your original geometry sequence so you can re-compress in newer versions. Please also note that 0.7 is not backward compatible with the Beta version. A step-by-step migration guide in the ZibraGDS documentation covers upgrading projects, re-importing assets, and re-linking actors and Level Sequences.