Zibra AI's new Unreal Engine plug in brings real-time volumetric VFX for games and virtual studios

Ukrainian deep-tech creative solutions company Zibra AI has today announced the launch of its newest plugin for Unreal Engine 5 and Houdini . ZibraVDB aims to bring film-quality, real-time volumetric VFX for games, virtual production studios and CGI studios in film and TV by utilising GPU-powered compressed VDB effects.

The company says ZibraVDB replays large VFX volumes stored in OpenVDB format within Unreal Engine, delivering up to 100x compression and rendering times twice as fast as Unreal’s Streaming Virtual Texturing (SVT). The tool opens up new possibilities for realistic scene lighting, offering a high compression rate and minimal visible difference between compressed and decompressed VFX.

Built for small studios and large companies involved in Virtual Production and CGI within Unreal Engine, Zibra AI's Zibra VDB aims to streamline content creation, enabling the use of complex visual effects, optimising workflows and enhancing rendering capabilities. The aim is to enable the use of previously impractical render volumes in real-time environments, also saving on cost as processing times are lower and less storage is needed for processing.

Using custom AI-based technology, ZibraVDB makes it possible to compress huge VFX created in different tools and stored in OpenVDB format by 20x on average and even reaching 100x for some cases, without increasing the build size. Volumetric effects can be rendered in game engines in real-time and reused in multiple use cases, optimizing memory consumption. And users can change the way the effect looks in different parts of the project with shaders, regulating color, density, and playback speed.

If you want to know more about Epic Games' engine, see our Unreal Engine 5 explainer .