Open Source Days 2026

OpenVDB was the first project accepted into the ASWF in 2018 and has continued to establish itself as the ubiquitous choice for sparse volumes in VFX and Animation. However, the file format underlying it has remained unchanged since 2014. The newer tools and techniques available today make a strong case for modernization.

This session will provide an overview of some of the key open-source file formats in use in the VFX and Animation industry today, and discuss the approaches they have taken to I/O and compression, before looking at some of the latest libraries and techniques that have become widely adopted. We will do a deep dive into the new OpenVDB file format in which these lessons directly informed the design, using performance and compression data to provide clear motivation for a breaking change. Finally, we will share details of our new extensible codec framework and invite the audience to contribute new ideas and develop new codecs to improve on those shipped with OpenVDB.

In addition to the significant changes to our file format, we will also briefly go over major changes—especially to NanoVDB—which now supports many novel dynamic (vs. static) applications of sparse volumes on the GPU. This includes constructing grids from meshes and points, deforming level set surfaces, merging and pruning grids on the GPU, as well as fundamental topology operations like morphological dilation. Finally, we will also talk about new changes to our toolset, in particular vectorization and vdb_tool.