NDVDB - Cinematic OpenVDB Importer & Real-Time Renderer

NDVDB converts your OpenVDB (.vdb) sequences into .ndvdb, its own GPU-ready streaming format: sparse bricks, per-bring quantization, frame-to-frame deltas and a lossless Zstandard envelope, typically hundreds of megabytes where the raw cache was many gigabytes. Then it plays them back instantly. No baking to flipbooks, no mesh proxies, no cloud processing.

A true VDB importer and player. These are real volumetric effects, not 6-way lit flipbooks. One-time purchase. Full C# and shader source included. No subscription.

Volumes that composite correctly
Most VDB players draw each volume as its own transparent object, and the moment two effects overlap the sorting breaks. NDVDB's scene compositor raymarches all visible volumes jointly in a single pass:
• Physically correct overlap and interpenetration: push a fireball through a smoke plume and the blend is right, per sample
• Cross-volume shadows: one effect's smoke genuinely darkens its neighbors
• Scene geometry casts main-light shadows into the smoke; volumes cast shadows back onto the scene
• Self-shadowing for contrast and definition, with a per-volume light cache so it costs a fetch per sample, not a re-march
• Point and spot lights illuminate the volume, with a selectable occlusion cost per light
• The flame grid lights your fireball from within and blends into nearby smoke by default
• Fire lights the smoke around it: the flame grid acts as an area light on its own volume and its neighbours, cone-traced through the smoke each frame, so exposed fire reaches the plume next door with no hot spots and no lag
• Fire lights the world: optional flame-driven point lights placed on the fire you can see (buried flame earns none), occluded by intervening smoke, animated in the sequence's own time so held frames hold and slow motion slows them
• Half-resolution marching with temporal accumulation: cinematic quality at real-time cost
• Multiple scattering for lighter smoke independent of density
• Blender fluid caches land where they were simulated: the converter reads the cache's config folder for the domain's world placement, adaptive domains included
• Ambient sky light with an in-volume occlusion boost, so shadowed smoke keeps depth instead of going flat; take the sky and ground colors from the scene's own ambient probe, with ground bounce occluded from below, and a powder term for the crumpled edges of cumulus
• Depth-correct sorting against transparents: particles, glass and water sort into and behind the smoke, not just in front of it
• Density range up to 100x for thin sims that still need to occlude, such as missile and rocket trails
• Import at 1:1 scale with the simulation origin preserved, for easy line-up with scene assets
• Non-uniform domains with sparse sampling, so long effects like trails stay affordable
• Frustum culling with an eight-slot pool: place as many effects as the shot needs; only the ones in view take compositor slots, off-screen effects keep streaming so a pan reveals them without a hitch, and a per-effect priority decides who keeps a slot when a shot gets crowded

Water: over, under, and through the surface
Explosions at the waterline are the shots everyone remembers, and the ones most volumetric plugins fumble. NDVDB splits the march at the rendered water surface, wave by wave:
• Renders above and below the surface simultaneously, from either side of it, including with the camera sitting exactly on the waterline, and stays stable when the camera crosses the surface mid-shot
• Surface breaches sort correctly: a missile launched from underwater carries its smoke through the waves without a seam
• Smoke beyond the water refracts through the waves like everything else underwater; smoke in front composites cleanly over it
• Waves cover and reveal the smoke as they pass, using the water system's own surface mask
• Underwater smoke takes on your water system's own fog, matched to KWS2's absorption and to Crest's fog at the smoke's true distance, so it never reads as a cutout and its edges stay soft over open water
• KWS Water System 2 and Crest Water 4 are detected automatically. No component, no compile dependency. Optional override components and a generic surface component cover any planar water

A workflow built for shots
• Converter window with honest quality tiers (Draft / Standard / Cinematic) and per-grid role mapping. It tells the sequences in a folder apart, warns about missing frames, and rescales centimetre exports at import; "Convert & Import" hands you a ready-to-drop prefab
• Fast, multi-core conversion: every core reads and encodes different frames at once, source files are streamed once (external and spinning drives included), and typical sequences convert in seconds rather than minutes
• Setup wizard audits your URP renderers and fixes every problem with one click; each player's inspector re-checks its own setup
• Native Timeline support: tracks, clips, scrubbing, multi-effect sequencing, activation. A clip snaps to the sequence's exact length at its frame rate, and a per-clip Frame Rate Override rescales it in place, with looping, clip-in, speed multiplier and extrapolation all supported
• Per-effect materials: share one material template across effects or instance it per player, so one fireball can run hotter, darker or purple without touching the others
• Metadata you can read and edit: the asset inspector shows frame count, duration, value range, compressed and raw sizes, compression ratio, source file and creator. Edit the frame rate, or the import scale and offset for unit and placement fixes, and the .ndvdb header is patched in place, no re-conversion; scene players update live
• Editor preview with transport controls: scrub, loop, and frame-step without entering Play Mode
• Layout mode for VDB-heavy cinematics: block the scene with cheap proxies (Preview / Brick / Bounds Only) from the Scene view toolbar. Play mode, recording, and builds always render at full fidelity
• An NDVDB overlay in the Scene view: layout level, compositor status and switches, and a live per-player table of state, frame, RAM and GPU memory, without leaving the viewport
• Streaming cache with a RAM budget you control; sequences deploy to builds automatically
• Every lever exposed: step size, shadow taps, scattering, temporal feedback, and per-volume overrides for when the defaults are not the shot

Made for cinematics, trailers, cutscenes, and high-end gameplay moments.