First introduced in 2012, nowadays OpenVDB is commonly applied in simulation tools such as Houdini, EmberGen, Blender, and used in feature film production for creating realistic volumetric images. This format, however, lacks the GPUs support and can not be applied in games due to the considerable file size (on average at least a few Gigabytes) and computational effort required to render 3D volumes.

Volumetric data has numerous important applications in computer graphics and VFX production. It’s used for volume rendering, fluid simulation, fracture simulation, modeling with implicit surfaces, etc. However, this data is not so easy to work with. In most cases volumetric data is represented on spatially uniform, regular 3D grids. Although dense regular grids are convenient for several reasons, they have one major drawback – their memory footprint grows cubically with respect to grid resolution.

OpenVDB format, developed by DreamWorksAnimation, partially solves this issue by storing voxel data in a tree-like data structure that allows the creation of sparse volumes. The beauty behind this system is that it completely ignores empty cells, which drastically decreases memory and disk usage, simultaneously making the rendering of volumes much faster.

www.aswf.io/blog/project-update-openvdb-version-9-0-0-available-now-introduces-gpu-support/

github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openvdb/releases/tag/v9.0.0