VDBs Look INCREDIBLE In Unreal Engine 

Thank You so much for featuring our unlimited library in this video. It’s so exciting to see complex volumes working in UE5 🎉. - Great content as usual! - Happy creating! 😊

Nice one Josh, love the audio that you matched with your renders, very cool.

Amazing. Keep up the good work. Please don't stop posting content.

Exactly what I needed! Thanks!

Nice work, great details! Thank you sir

This was insane! Thanks for sharing

nice find! quality alternative to niagara cards

Amazing content as usual! I tried the VDB plugin, but it seems to have some limitations. It doesn't appear to be integrated with path tracing reference depth of field (DOF), and height fog. I'm not sure if I didn't set it up correctly or if something else is causing the issue.

Hi, can't wait to try import VDBs from Houdini. Thanks for the tutorial! A question I have is how does this compare to alembic files (which are natively supported in UE) ? EDIT: asked ChatGPT and got this answer : VDBs (Volumetric Data Blocks) and Alembic files serve different purposes in 3D content creation. Alembic is a file format used for transferring complex 3D scene data between applications. It's widely adopted in the VFX industry due to its ability to efficiently store complex, time-varying geometry, and other scene data. It's ideal for representing animated models and complex effects, including high-resolution models with hundreds of thousands to millions of polygons. VDB, on the other hand, was developed by DreamWorks Animation for the representation of sparse volumetric data discretized on a three-dimensional grid. It's commonly used in simulations, such as fluid dynamics, smoke, fire, or any other kind of 3D volumetric data. VDB allows artists to handle large, complicated volumes of data while optimizing space and computational resources. The main difference is that Alembic is geared towards geometric data (like polygon meshes and subdivision surfaces), including animation, while VDB is designed to handle volumetric data, like fluids, gases, and volumetric effects.

Thanks for the video! But while fire, explosions, etc. in unreal engine do not look very realistic, I think the best option for such tasks is to use embergen and do compositing

I'm early today!

Good stuff Joshua, I do wonder if niagara is liquids are more or less taxing, I think niagara looks better most of the time, compared to imported vdb's, but not sure about how true that actually is

Hey, thanks for the tutorial that's very neat! I also have a question; I've been using this plugin for few weeks now, I do have a explosion vdb which looks very nice in editor, good flame colours, nice smoke clouds but when I render it out, explosion looks very different.. any idea why is that happening? Keep up the great content!

I've been playing this week in 5.3 as a native import. Some observations : Import Attribute and colour channel matter. I'd say in the beginning screenshot the import dialogue as your material will have to match the import. As you mature you'll change the attributes\channels to match the code rather than matching the code to the import (facepalm). There might be a better way but I had a hard time spawning Hetero's directly playing the anim. Putting it inside a BP and hooking it up to begin event worked great. You really want to delete the object as soon at the effect is done. These things keep killing performance as long as the actor exists in a playing state. I tried turning the playing' state off, but I could not work out how to query when it was finished as there seems to be no end event or pause delay. So, for now I just divide the frames by the frame rate and set the bp object lifespan to that. If I use a 1gb explosion I saw a 15fps drop (in PIE sorry) on my 3060ti. So, if you envisage a cool battlefield with explosions, grenades, dust clouds... prepare to pay for that dearly. The VDB's are usually offset. I kinda work this out but creating a level with a cone at 0,0,0. Then reset a test hetero to where it should be, then recorded the relative transform and edited that in in the BP. Lastly, look carefully at what you use VDB's for. I can only find use cases for either things like fire, which can smoothly loop(because it's not smooth) and short lived effects. Things like smoke have no looping assets so are only good for cutscenes, etc. Looks bloody awesome... until you couple it with a sun light source (like Ultra Dynamic Sky). then all the white\\grey smoke ends up end up brown form the sun's orange component. I'm sure someone more experience with lighting knows how to solve that, but so far thats not me. Best of luck.

what about render times and path tracing? Are they improved in 5.2?

in which version did you turn out so smoothly and cleanly? or did you then bring DeNoiser by grinding

When I click on track in the sequencer, there’s no option for vdb. Is there anything I can do? Everything up until that step works fine. Thank you.

tell me how to get rid of noise on VDB? I have a fire with smoke that looks very pixelated and noisy, do you have any tips on how to smooth it out or eliminate it?

How did u make the explosion be emisive? Like i want to know how to affetct the world.

All fun until u do a ps5 package with minimal setup (1Frame vdb) and see 10 ms down 😅

Great stuff Joshua! 7k subscibers as i write this, I'll come back to this comment in a while to see you at 100k :)

I have a question: let's make a short film using VP! OKay, admittedly, not a question.

Hi Joshua, tried that plugin. My VDB's look different in editor and in a game mode. Why? In editor they are much nicer.

nice post...but plug in does not work for 5.3 - Btw, unreal's greatest let down / weakness is their plug in's don't update with each version (unlike blender i.e. once you pay for a plug in, blender do everything possible to ensure it works in future versions).

Is working with Path tracing ?

iT'S funny that when you set the local step to 1, the computer start to be so slow even your video recording gets laggy😂

Not working with 5.3

Нихера не понял где эти файлы vbd искать, в поиске добавить не находит ничего, посмотреть папку отдельно, несколько версий, ничего не видит

Vdbs look amazing till you try and hit that compile project button and it errors out for 3 hrs till it finally compiles. They look really good though lol.

What are VDBs? I can't watch the video yet since I'm at work

..uses paysite VFXHut.. hasn't activated windows o_O

Fun fact: VDB, today, doesn't stand for anything as an acronym.

nah man, this is overkill for vdb's really. You could easily replicate that using a higher quality flipbook or multi flipbooks and it'll be way cheaper than rendering verts.

activate windows wowowo :)

Are we all gonna gloss over the pirated version of Windows? Lmfao.