AcademySoftwareFoundation/openvdb

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3382 stars · 767 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

OpenVDB is an Academy Award-winning open-source C++ library providing a hierarchical data structure and tool suite for efficiently storing and manipulating sparse volumetric data on 3D grids. Originally developed by DreamWorks Animation for film VFX, it is now maintained by the Academy Software Foundation and includes NanoVDB for GPU support and OpenVDB AX, a DSL for volumetric manipulation.

Use cases

• store and manipulate sparse volumetric data in C++
• voxelize meshes and other geometry into 3D grids
• render volumes like smoke and fire in a VFX pipeline
• run fluid simulations on sparse grids
• process level sets with CSG, filtering, and compositing operations
• work with volumetric data on the GPU via NanoVDB
• read and write .vdb volume files

When to choose

• you need high-performance sparse 3D volume storage with fast random access
• you are building VFX, simulation, or rendering tools involving volumes
• you need GPU-accelerated volumetric processing with NanoVDB
• you need a mature, industry-standard volume format compatible with Houdini

When to avoid

• you only need simple dense voxel grids for a small game
• your project cannot handle C++ build complexity and dependencies
• you need a lightweight header-only solution with no compilation

Facets

library · maturity stable

graphics simulation image-processing serialization file-system graphics simulation developer-tools cpp cross-platform python sparse-volumes voxels vfx nanovdb level-sets houdini volumetric-data game-development gpu

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