What are people's techniques for shrinking or dealing with large VDB files? We are hitting 5GB per frame with just density + velocity, trying to use VolumeCompress to bring it down to 16 bit seems to have no effect on VDBs. Thinking of masking the velocity with the density.

Thanks!

You may want to look into controlling the voxel count before you hit the compress.

thanks but I'm looking for a technical answer to maintain detail i.e. dithering, vdb compression, discretization of the volumes etc.

VDB don't support any quantization schemes like that, that I know of. All you can do is try to limit number of active voxels, and/or enable 16bit (use primitive sop.)

thanks, I'll have to try that - removing the velocities has reduced it to ~0.5GB. It's a classic far away smoke that then hits the camera. Needs to be rendered with motionblur in Vray though.

Deactivate the vel field using density as a mask. That way you only get velocity where you need it for rendering.

@Skybar - I'm failing terribly at deactivating. Can anyone fix my example please.
Thx!