VDB Clouds in Bifrost Maya

Hi Guys, check those tutorials by Maximilian Schönherr, he is showing us the basics of working with VDB clouds in Maya Bifrost.

How to work with VDB clouds in Maya Bifrost?

The Bifrost Graph editor, sometimes connotated as Bifröst 2.0, offers quite a few “VDB”-nodes. Let’s check how is simple and straight forward usage of the VDB volume node.

That’s what this tutorial is about. You can follow the tutorial with any openVDB file.

In this tutorial it was used clouds by Brandon Young, which you can found here, free to download, over 1 GB in size, 200 VDB files:

VDB Clouds in Bifrost Maya Tutorial

Maya: VDB Clouds in the Bifröst Graph Editor

 

Also, check this tutorial about how to create a blast of fire using an advanced technique called openVDB.

How to create a blast of fire in Maya?

Maya: A Static and Impressive VDB Explosion

 

openVDB is a format which describes objects with no hard shell, smoke, clouds, fire. In Maya these things are being handled by volume materials.

With the Arnold Volume shader alone you can achieve amazing effects. VDB shortens the path to a good result dramatically. I use only four steps in order to get this explosion.vdb to look amazing.

The tutorial is only 10 minutes long, so I don’t animate the explosion, I just render it in its static state, described by the VDB file. To follow along, search the web or your local hard drive for .vdb files, there are tons of them out there on the internet.