Open VDB Import/Export
Is there a import plugin/addon or something for VDB import to blender?
There are some early scripts, but there is nothing that works in the official build of 2.8.
This would be a great bridge between houdini and blender. So if there is a possebility to get a box as Volume Container to render Smoke or Cloud Simulations that would be very nice! The blender internal simulation is still a bit slow when it is necessary to have high displacement details in the smoke.
If this is a double post and there is another solution to the question out there please tell me. ;)
11 Comments
Sebastián Barschkis (the developer of mantaflow) just confirmed on his twitter account that the OpenVDB import will be available for Blender 2.82 ! What a great news !
* @Peine_Perdue * great news! Thank you ;)
* @Peine_Perdue * link or it didn't happen!
* @momotron2000 * twitter.com/sebbas/status/1184478258760441862
* @Peine_Perdue * But he also said more recently that it will be deffered
it`s very important， really want vdb surport soon。。。。
Tangent animation used VDB's to bring Houdini simulations into Blender for Next Gen. They wrote a custom patch for it, which hasn't landed in master yet (and now it's outdated- they were using 2.76). 2.80 AFAIK supports saving to .vdb. I think it's possible to trick it into reading .vdbs by doing a dummy bake, and then replacing all the cache files with the good .vdb's. Then make sure the names are the same; you could find any number of rename utilities or write on in Python. I haven't tried this, either, so no promises.
It's obvious that better vdb support is needed for the future. I think implementing Mantaflow is the first priority though, since it will be able to make excellent smoke simulations regardless of whether vdb is supported. They can solve that problem while Blender users have access to the new simulation tools, so users still have an option. I could be wrong about that- it's just my reading of the situation.
This is now implemented, so I think you should mark the status as "Done" :)
Fairly sure the new sculpt remesh coming in 2.81 uses OpenVDB.
* @ammusionist * That's true. OpenVDB is in Blender already, but it doesn't import or export the file in a very user friendly way. I'm not even sure you can import it, even with the workaround I suggested below. Blender 2.80 can save vdb's from to cache the smoke simulation. But it isn't possible to export .vdb's from anything else.
I think the plan for the future is to make a new object type for volumes that will use vdb internally, but I don't know. There was even a suggestion on a recent Blender Today that the new sculpt system (no date yet) that Pablo Dobarro is working on may use vdb's internally and it would essentially be sculpting in a volume/voxel. I don't know what the status of that is now- the discussion was about changing the sculpt mesh format in Blender to make sculpting more consistent in the code, since Pablo was having to write a function for mesh, dyntopo, and multires. I don't know what the end result of this was or will be, but to my knowledge the situation in 2,8 is mostly the same as in 2.79. 2.81 brings some really nice speedups but no fundamental changes (unless you count the revolutionary new brushes).
If you search "VDB" here, you'll find quite a few proposals wrapped around the same theme... though none of theme are particularly complete.