David Fuhrer has been working on procedural tools for working with OpenVDB SDF volumes within Side Effects Houdini. VDB Painter (formerly mbPainter), will offer an artist friendly toolset for interactively manipulating volumes.
VDB Painter, artist friendly tools for interactive control over OpenVDB SDF Volumes in Houdini.
VDB Painter includes brush tools, a mesh fusion tool and filter tools, that works on a single node, staring binary data within the asset. This will enable artists to use all the OpenVDB tools interactive’y, right within Houdini’s Viewport.
Particularly interesting are the examples showing the tools in sue for sculpting and hard surface modeling.
VDB Painter Features
- Full Interactive Workflow from one SOP. (Binary Data is stored within the Asset)
- Sculpting Tool Operations with Autocaching and Mari Styled Bake Function.
- 8+ Generic Brush Operations (Airbrush, Cutter, Erasor, Smooth, Soft Add/Remove, Spliner, Buildup)
- Global Mirrored Paint and Mesh Fusion.
- Fully Integrated Interactive VDB Combiner within the Viewport (Mesh Fusion): Add, Remove and Inverted mode.
- Voxel Resolution Resample on the fly at any time.
- Support for Custom User Inputs in all Context.
- Custom User Input for Projection Painting.
- Basic Filter Tools: Noise, Blur and Smooth
You can download an Alpha version for the OpenVDB tools, and read through installation and documentation.