Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535742
TURN UP THE VOLUME From the moment he entered the zeitgeist in Shrek 2 to his inevitable breakout headlining his own movies, that swaggering cat Puss may have had his head in the clouds. But by the time filmmakers at DreamWorks were looking to actually send him skyward in a key sequence of Puss in Boots (2011), they needed to make sure those clouds looked spectacular in the fairytale world they were creating. The film heralded the first cinematic use of Volume Data Blocks (VDB), a game-changing technology that would redefine how volumetric effects like smoke, fire, and water were handled on screen—and, of course, clouds. As Visual Effects Super visor Jeff Budsberg explains, around 2009 , traditional simulation struggled to process the enormous volume of data required to render realistic clouds. With Puss in Boots in the pipeline, the filmmakers faced a challenge. "A cloud doesn't really fit in a box. There's a lot of wasted space," says Budsberg, explaining that Puss had to interact with cloud environments, with "really demanding cloudscapes that were kind of art directed… The resolution required for this was astronomical, and it would not have been possible with the historical nature of storing data." Ultimately winning two Motion Picture Academy Scientific and Technical Awards for this technology along with his team, Computational Scientist and former DreamWorks' Senior Principal Engineer and Director of Research and Development Ken Museth helmed the design and implementation of the VDB library in 2010 and 2011. Budsberg says its goal was to solve difficult production issues that artists were running into in the effects department, such as 3D volumetric clouds and fast particle-liquid surfacing. Museth strongly urged sharing this innovation as an open source project with the industry at large, and it was initially released to the public in 2012. This led to the widespread adoption of OpenVDB and its integration into software like Maya and Houdini. A next big leap for DreamWorks came with The Croods (2013), which used OpenVDB for a broad range of effects— along with fire and smoke, there was lots of destruction and notably, a 1.5 billion voxel pyroclastic flow. That sequence became a technical benchmark at the studio. A process that once would have taken painstaking hours could now be achieved efficiently, opening paths for working with elements in new ways that contributed to compelling storytelling. opposite page: Disney's crowds technology advanced exponentially from 2012's Wreck-It Ralph (top) to 2022's Strange World with 56 million crowds elements; this page DreamWorks-developed OpenVDB change the way artists could deal with volumetrics, from clouds in Puss in Boots (top left) to water in The Croods. Images courtesy of DreamWorks Animation SUMMER 2025 39