Image courtesy of Lee Griggs
NanoVDB, a leaner version of OpenVDB is now implemented in Arnold!
NanoVDB uses a linearised, read-only representation of the VDB tree structure, streamlining the rendering process on GPU.
With NanoVDB now implemented in Arnold, you can render clouds, smoke, or any complex special effect with the same sparse memory footprint as on CPU. Compared to our previous dense grid approach, NanoVDB reduces the memory usage for volumes by a factor of more than 6, and renders 40% faster due to empty space skipping, making it well-suited for GPU.
