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Volumes 101: VDBs vs. Standard Volumes (Patreon)

Published:
2017-09-05 13:35:22
Imported:
2026-06
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Videos

Content

Continuing our volume fundamentals, we take a closer look at the differences between VDBs ad standard Houdini volumes, with a focus on representing geometry in volumes. We will find out why VDBs are a really clever alternative to standard volumes and what makes them so fast.

Files

Previews only

Volumes 101 pt. 4: VDBs vs. Standard Volumes

Comments

Robert Cober

Great videos! Question - Now that NanoVDB exists for VDBs, has the usefulness of the standard volumes reduced further? Can you use VDBs with OpenCL now? Still learning about this - thanks for any insight

andrew farhall

Volume series, excellent stuff thanks. Just done vdb v standard volumes and i have a question. You mention the vdbsmoothsdf node is for smoothing out geometry but surely we're still only dealing with a volume at this stage. The sdf hasn't yet been turned into polygons?

entagma

Hey Andrew, although the SDF hasn't been turned into polygons it still represents geometry in that it stores a surface. So what differentiates VDBSmoothSDF from VDBSmooth is that it offers two additional smoothing modes that operate on surfaces only and that it does renormalization which means it keeps your SDF intact. When doing very aggressive smoothing operations you can run into situations where you mess up your SDF and end up having troubles reconstructing a proper surface out of your volume. VDBSmoothSDF tries to prevent this. Cheers, Mo :)