Dreamworks Animation has released a new version of its OpenVDB library. The animation production company open sourced the project in August and has now released version 0.99.0. OpenVDB has been used for some time within Dreamworks for features such as Puss in Boots, Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted and the just released Rise of the Guardians.

OpenVDB is a C++ library which includes a hierarchical data structure and a suite of tools for manipulating data within that structure as sparse, time-varying, volumetric data mapped to a three dimensional grid. Developed at Dreamworks by Ken Museth, the original VDB allows animators to use an "infinite" 3D index space yet benefit from compact storage and fast data access when processing spaces. The library's algorithms include filtering compositing, numerical simulation, sampling and voxelisation, all optimised to the OpenVDB data structures.

The library and tools also include a standalone OpenGL viewer and native Houdini integration. Houdini is a 3D animation package from Side Effects Software and its next major release will incorporate OpenVDB and a full suite of volume processing nodes. Side Effects Software developers are listed as contributors to OpenVDB.

OpenVDB is licensed under the Mozilla Public Licence 2.0 which was selected in part because it "seeks to balance the concerns of proprietary and open source developers". The library is available to download, but has only been tested on Red Hat Linux; support for other platforms will be available soon. The download page contains links to a selection of sample models from the NASA 3D resources and Stanford 3D Scanning Repository, along with a toolkit for Houdini 12 integration.

(djwm)