OTOY Forums

Hello,

I have a basic VDB volume which is only 10MB. Octane loads it in almost 3 minutes. If i convert it to a standard volume it takes 10 seconds which is a lot faster but still seems too much for 10MB and VDB is supposed to be faster than standard volumes.

Volumes: https://we.tl/t-TMU7ZwQ51j

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64bit
GPU: RTX 2080 Ti
RAM: 64 GB
CPU: AMD 3970X
Driver: 451.48
Octane: 2020.1.3
Host: Houdini 18.0.499

The vdb cache file is small, but the volume grid is not small, it has [759, 286, 678] voxeles!

The extraction of the Houdini "vdb" primitives can be indeed very slow. This is a limitation that comes from the internal HDK functions used to sampling the volume data and the fact that we must sample each voxel to build the Octane internal volume structure. The Houdini "volume" primitives are indeed a lot faster, because the HDK functions used to extract the data are also a lot faster. I'll take a look at it to check if something has changed in the latest Houdini version that can be used to improve the "vdb" primitives extraction time.

In any case, Octane can load the OpenVDB files itself from the core, at the render time, and like happens with other renderers this is in fact the best available workflow to work with volumes. If you are going to work on a project with a lot of volumes, you should think about using OpenVDB as cache files and configure Octane to use these files to render them.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

Thanks! I tried loading vdb files but I get this error:

unsupported VDB file format (expected version 223 or earlier, got version 224)
cannot read metadata "file_delayed_load" of unregistered type "__delayedload"

Houdini 18 uses a newer format than octane I guess so I would need to install an older Houdini.

If you are working with the latest Octane 2020.1.3.0 build the volume should be rendered in any case. This is a message reported from the Octane OpenVDB libs, but you can ignore it.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

Oh, nice, thank you!