This Free Tool Lets You Render OpenVDB Natively In Nuke

Community-made tools are always great, and they're even better when they're free. Marty Blumen just released VDB Render, a free add-on that lets you render volumes right in Nuke without the round-trip hassle, while keeping everything physically accurate and production-ready.

It's a single C++ NDK node that ray marches density, temperature, flame, velocity, and color, complete with deep output, emission, motion blur, and AOVs. It also comes with a sun/sky system and spherical harmonics-based studio lighting. There are nine presents, including smoke, fog, clouds, fire, and explosions.

According to the developer, VDB Render's interface is intentionally minimal and task-focused. A typical workflow is simple: load a VDB, connect a camera, pick a preset, and render. Lighting and look-development controls are kept short and interactive. Under the hood, it's "compiled with AVX2 and FMA optimisations, and uses techniques such as per-scanline accessor pooling and early ray termination to maintain interactivity where possible". Right now, the add-on supports OpenVDB 12, and OpenVDB 13 support is planned for the future.

Marty describes VDB Render as a "small but meaningful step toward bringing volumetric workflows more directly into Nuke." The project is compatible with Nuke 17 and is available on GitHub if you want to build it from source. There's also a ready-to-use Windows release on Nukepedia.

Lately, Marty has been creating various tools for color pipelines, 3D workflows, and more. More of his creations are up on Nukepedia.

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