cwalrus 12 Posted October 25, 2015 Hi - Could someone explain what VDB and SDF are, in plain english? I thought they were different types of volumes, but I see odd terminology in the help file that seems to combine them: dop_example_keyframedgrains from the docs thanks Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Jason 134 Posted October 25, 2015 VDB is a sparse voxel storage format. An SDF is a scalarfield (of distances to a surface) which can by stored within the VDB format, or within the dense voxel format in Houdini simply called "Volumes". 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
f1480187 775 Posted October 25, 2015 (edited) I thought they were different types of volumes Fog and SDF are different types of volumes. VDB is a new fast implementation of them, I think it intended to supersede standard Houdini's Volumes, tending to re-create its nodes, although it seems, that it will be subset of them, with some unique features in both implementations. Edited October 25, 2015 by f1480187 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
mestela 700 Posted October 25, 2015 Writing this stuff out forces me to understand it better, just blatted down some notes here: http://www.tokeru.com/mayawiki/index.php?title=Houdini#Volumes 5 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
cwalrus 12 Posted October 26, 2015 holy batman Matt - are you the author of that entire site? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
mestela 700 Posted October 26, 2015 Yep. Whenever I learn a thing, I have to write it down, otherwise it's gone within a week. 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
f1480187 775 Posted October 26, 2015 This is very well-written and informative notebook. The fact it is maintained by one man is... impressive. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
RayLeblancArt 2 Posted October 26, 2015 Writing this stuff out forces me to understand it better, just blatted down some notes here: http://www.tokeru.com/mayawiki/index.php?title=Houdini#Volumes Wow........ I had to toss that in my houdini bookmarks, that is some awesome stuff there. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Jason 134 Posted October 26, 2015 Very cool, Matt. Very cool. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
mestela 700 Posted October 26, 2015 Dawww.... you guys.... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Aaron Auty 0 Posted October 26, 2015 Ohh my goodness, greeble! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
art3mis 56 Posted July 11, 2016 But VDB, SDF are acronyms for exactly....what? Houdini is an acronym lovers utopia it seems:) 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Hamp 30 Posted July 11, 2016 From OpenVDB.org Quote Over the years VDB has been interpreted to mean different things, none of which are very descriptive: "Voxel Data Base", "Volumetric Data Blocks", "Volumetric Dynamic B+tree", etc. In early presentations of VDB we even used a different name, "DB+Grid", which was abandoned to emphasize its distinction from similarly named, but different, existing sparse data structures like DT-Grid or DB-Grid. The simple truth is that "VDB" is just a name. :-) SDF stands for "Signed Distance Field". Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
malexander 404 Posted July 12, 2016 5 hours ago, eco_bach said: But VDB, SDF are acronyms for exactly....what? Houdini is an acronym lovers utopia it seems:) VDB is actually a third party lib from Dreamworks. I guess they love their acronyms too Volume: Dynamic Blocked is what I believe it stands for. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
