Export of .geo format data only works for polygons. What we want to do is export volumetric data in VDB format so that we can perform volumetric post-processing in Houdini.
There is a package called Redshift which allows you to perform volumetric rendering of VDB data in Houdini using the GPU. Render times per frame have been shown to go down from 1 hour to 2 minutes.
From my perspective, this is a pretty big WOW.
So, my questions:
Does it make sense to add this writer into ParaView?
It’s doable for sure. We’d need a bit more exhaustive investigation to see how complicated it could be, but shouldn’t be too hard esp. if we can start with a small set of use-cases to support in the first pass.
OpebVDB is open source, C++. Every 3d package that I can think of supports it. Maya, blender, modo, lightwave, 3d studio max, cinema 4d, Houdini… Also render engines like renderman, Arnold, vray and others support it.
I assume that with all of that support, it is not too difficult to create a writer.
I see that the VDB Writer is already in the works here. That said, is there a VDB Reader for ParaView that is available somewhere? Or, would it be part of the Writer addition?
I’m not going to develop a reader. Since VDB is designed to be a sparse storage format with multiple “grids” it’s not clear to me what type of dataset to read in as. The best I can think of right now would be a composite dataset of point clouds. We don’t have a strong use case for reading in VDB files into VTK or ParaView so we can’t justify spending the resources to develop a reader.
