[Released] VDB Wizard: Advanced VDB creation tool for Daz Studio [Commercial]
EZ3DTV
Posts: 1,669
VDB Wizard for Daz Studio v4 and v6
https://www.daz3d.com/vdbwizard-advanced-vdb-creation-tool-for-daz-studio
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
VDB Wizard is a complete volumetric content generator for Daz Studio. It produces OpenVDB density and emission grids that
drop straight into Daz scenes through DIM, ready for Iray rendering. Generate clouds, fog, smoke, sparkles, atmospheric
haze, weather effects, and fluid simulations from inside a single Avalonia application that runs alongside Daz Studio.
The wizard reads your scene terrain and camera, then places volumes that respect the geometry and the framing you have in
mind. Sliders control every aspect of generation, from voxel size to noise texture to particle count, with no hidden caps.
A live GPU raymarching preview shows you exactly what Iray will produce before you commit to a render. When you are happy
with the look, click Inject to Daz and the volume lands in your scene as a DUF reference, ready to render.
VDB Wizard is built for Daz artists who want production quality volumetric effects without leaving the Daz workflow. Every
preset saves complete project state, every output is portable across machines, and every mode targets a specific
volumetric look from photoreal cumulus clouds to swirling fluid plumes to scattered atmospheric sparkles.
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BULLET POINTS
Generate full OpenVDB density and emission volumes from inside Daz Studio
Live GPU raymarching preview shows the final look before injecting
Camera aware cloud, fog, and atmosphere placement that follows scene framing
Standalone Avalonia application launches from a Daz toolbar button
Smoke modes for surface fog, room fog, atmospheric haze, fog walls, and weather
Cloud mode for cumulus and stratus skies populated above your terrain
Swarm modes for blob clusters, ground fog drifts, and scattered cloud puffs
Eulerian fluid simulation for cohesive swirling smoke plumes
Particle simulation for wispy fuzzy plume character
Fire and sparkle modes for embers, glowing dust, and emission effects
Weather generation for rain, snow, and dust storm volumes
Slider driven controls with no hidden caps or silent clamps
Save and load complete project state across machines and drives
Iray ready output with proper density and emission channels
Installs through DIM with no manual file copying required
Includes PDF user manual and Daz toolbar setup script
Once you understand the fundamental aspects, the artwork that can come out of this is vast and unlimited.
VDB Wizard can make animated VDBs if you want to "manually create frames" which can be a tedious and imprecise undertaking, but it does make stills easily and without much effort once the basics are understood.
Search for live 4k VDB Wizard streams @EZ3DTV on YouTube shortly after the Daz Studio Store release date (you will need these). They will greatly simplify using VDB Wizard on your own.
Come join the live YouTube video tutorial chat and get your questions answered. The manual is very helpful, but the videos are a fast-track to mastering the program and its many features.
Enjoy this groundbreaking adventure into VDB authoring for Daz Studio!
Sincerely,
EZ3DTV
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Comments
You probably already know. VDBs are terrible slow while rendering in Daz Studio, unless you have a supercomputer.
I already abandoned all my already purchased VDBs assets, because of that.
VDB Wizard provides users with the tools to make VDBs that "fit" you scene.
Most VDBs made for Daz Studio are optimized for general use. When you can make your own VDBs you can tailor them to fit your processing needs and not be locked into something made for general use.
Being able to adjust the voxel and radii sizes of VDB Wizard's VDBs yourself means you could maybe start using them in your own limited way again.
I must admit, while I haven't used VDBs much, when I did, I didn't have any issues doing an animation with lots of instanced VDB clouds
i never had problems with VDBs bought on the daz store. I had a 2080ti and now a 4090 for context!
That explains a lot. 4090 is great for VDBs. Enjoy
Yup! There are clouds in VDB Wizard!
I am not sure if way back my 1080ti could handle VDBs but a 4090 can handle just about anything!
The way I work is I usually create my scene and adjust lighting and add VDBs last. VDBs are almost always the thing that pushes my video ram over, because they are always last. So I have to ask, do I need all the extra stuff or my VDB? I usually can find things in the scene I don’t really need there so my VDBs can fit.
The problem with my laptop and RTX 4070 is whenever I add VDB to the scene, the rendering time is so long,
that I have no patience enough to wait for the rendering end, so I skip using VDBs and I am enjoying using Daz Studio
with the other scenes.
Many Daz Store VDBs come in both high- and low-resolution versions. VDB Wizard can output both very high and very low-resolution versions and the camera culling feature and ground contouring allows for less of a voxel footprint. Would that be enough in your case? Well, some scenes are comprised of only a shallow VDB, a plane, a figure and a HDRI.
If the VDB fits into your graphics card, a 4070 should rip right through it. I would say 20 minutes to an hour tops for a very large 2 or 4k image?
Glad, you pointed it up. 20 minutes of rendering is too long for me.
That's 20 minutes only when the scene also has two or more Genesis 9 figures, many highly detailed props and a detailed environment, an Ultra Scenery landscape and biome with many thousands of instances and an 8-24k HDRI with massive mesh lighting. A scene like this can take 2-8 hours to create, so 20 minutes to get a butter-smooth and perfectly transparent VDB is appropriate.
Road of Mists
There are 5,000 individual VDB Wizard VDBs in this scene culled to the camera frustrum and it took 10 minutes to render up to around 20,000 iterations at 4k on a 5090.
You have great graphics card 5090, so you apparently adjusting your products to it.
Have fun developing your further assets.
I try and adjust my products so all users can use them with their own hardware, within reason.
Not all features are avalable but enough scalability, graceful degradation, level of detail (LOD) and accessibility to make it worthwhile.
Looking forward to this.
Thanks RandWulf, you won't be disappointed and it will be updated over time as users request new features. Buy it once, own it forever... Coming soon!
Now that VDB Wizard has been released, look for live tutorial videos here on Youtube @EZ3DTV (probably sometime today).
I can be very helpful in providing navigation on using this program to its fullest.
Thank you for your interest and purchases Daz Studio artists!
To make it easier to find the product, there is a link to it below:
https://www.daz3d.com/vdbwizard-advanced-vdb-creation-tool-for-daz-studio
Congratulations on the release and I wish you many sales.
Thank you for linking to the product for me Artini!
Thanks for the congrats and best wishes!
Introducing VDB Wizard for Daz Studio
A 2 hour toutorial on VDB Wizard and its many features.
Running into a challenge. Following the steps in the video and the manual, I get to the point of Injecting into Daz, and Studio just hangs with the "wait circle" spinning endlessly I have attched a photo of the log file. This is my system running Daz Studio 4.24 on a Dell Optiflex SFF 7020 desktop
Device name
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-14500 (2.60 GHz)
Installed RAM 64.0 GB (63.7 GB usable)
Graphics card Intel(R) UHD Graphics 770 (128 MB)
Storage 1.15 TB of 1.82 TB used
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch No pen or touch input is available for this display
Edition Windows 11 Pro
Version 25H2
Installed on 1/12/2026
OS build 26200.8894
Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.26100.334.0
Thanks for the detailed report and the log — that actually tells me exactly what's happening, and the good news is your machine is running VDB Wizard perfectly. Your log shows the volume being created and injected successfully, and it even confirms VDB Wizard's real-time GPU preview is working on your Intel graphics. Nothing on the VDB Wizard side is failing.
The spinning wheel is happening on the Daz Studio side, not in VDB Wizard. When the volume drops into your scene, Daz's Iray Preview viewport immediately tries to render that smoke live. Daz renders volumes through Iray, and Iray only gets its fast GPU acceleration from an NVIDIA card. Your system has Intel integrated graphics, so Daz falls back to rendering on the CPU — which still works, but a live volume preview on the CPU is extremely heavy and looks like an endless hang.
The fix is simple: before you inject, switch your Daz viewport from Iray to "Texture Shaded" (the draw-style dropdown at the top-right of the viewport). In Texture Shaded mode Daz won't try to render the volume live, so the inject completes instantly with no spinner. When you're ready to actually see the smoke, press Ctrl+R to start a render — it'll render correctly on your CPU, just give it more time than a GPU machine would need.
So you're not locked out of anything — you can author, preview, and render your volumes today with that one viewport change. The only thing an NVIDIA GPU would add is dramatically faster Iray render times in Daz.
Just to set expectations clearly: a VDB smoke volume is one of the heaviest things you can put in front of Daz's live Iray viewport, and on a CPU-only system that live preview simply can't keep up — that's the spinning wheel you're seeing. It's not a crash and nothing's broken; the volume is just too much for a real-time Iray view on integrated graphics.
The important part is that this only affects the live viewport, not the actual render. Work in Texture Shaded mode (you won't see the smoke there — that's normal, it's an Iray-only material), and when you're ready to see it, press Ctrl+R to render. That kicks off a proper Iray render pass with a progress bar that runs to completion on your CPU — slower than a GPU machine, but it will go through and the smoke will appear correctly in the final image.
So the rule of thumb on your setup: treat the live Iray viewport as too heavy for volumes, and use Ctrl+R to render instead. That keeps Daz responsive while you work and still gives you the full Iray result when you're ready.
Let me know if the Texture Shaded step clears the hang for you!
Thank you very much! That did the trick and it works perfectly -- I really appreciate it.
That's wonderful to hear — thank you for letting me know it worked!
Really glad you're up and rendering. If anything else comes up, don't hesitate to reach out — and enjoy your volumes!
— EZ3DTV
Here is an updated, easier to read and largely expanded version of the VDB Wizard manual.
VDB Wizard was one of my earliest offerings to the Daz 3D store. I have added new features and optimizations to the program.
This update will be rolled out to existing purchasers of VDB Wizard.
My original idea was to keep the manual short so it would not overwhelm anyone. I now think that was the wrong call. Short kept it approachable, but it also made some features harder to learn than they needed to be.
For people who do not like large manuals, please just skip over the parts that do not relate to or interest you.
The extended instructions are now here in the new manual attached to this post.
VDB Wizard 1.0.2
This update is mostly repairs, and one of them is significant enough to lead with.
- If your terrain sits a long way from the scene origin, volumes were exporting to the wrong place. Surface and swarm layers landed short of the land by exactly the distance the terrain was offset, so a scene built near zero looked fine while a large or far-placed landscape did not. Fog Wall was never affected, which is why it could look like only some modes were broken. This is fixed, and both Export and Inject now place volumes the same way.
Fixes
- Volumes export to the correct position when terrain is far from the scene origin
- Export and Inject no longer stop responding after cancelling the large-VDB warning
- Crisp edges now export crisp from Export, not only from Inject. Crisp Container and Crisp Particles layers were exporting soft, and in one case not appearing at all
- Layers no longer overwrite each other's files when two layers share a name
- The VDBWizard Launch button can no longer point at the previous project and load the wrong volume
- Inject no longer reports success when nothing was written
- A layer dropped for running out of memory is now explained, naming the layer, the resolution it tried and the setting to change. It used to disappear without a word
- Saving on close can no longer fail silently. If the save does not succeed the program stays open and tells you, instead of closing and losing the session
- With camera culling on, the status bar tells you to click VDBWizard Launch instead of showing camera coordinates
- VDB Wizard no longer writes a diagnostic file into your Daz Studio content library
- If the program closes unexpectedly it now leaves a crash log instead of vanishing silently
- Rotated or tilted terrain now imports exactly where Daz Studio has it. If a prop's pivot point is not at the scene origin, VDB Wizard was turning it around the origin instead of around its own pivot, so the volume got built against terrain that was not quite where the real terrain is. Most props have their pivot at the origin and were never affected by this.
Simulations
- Simulations can now be cancelled. Dragging a slider used to leave several full simulations running that nobody was waiting for, which is what made every other mode feel slow afterwards
- Simulations now leave cores free for the rest of the machine, as every other mode already did
- Particle Sim's smoothing pass uses all cores instead of one
- The fluid solver is roughly 13 to 14 percent faster, with identical output
Interface
- Every mode now gathers the sliders that decide generate time and memory at the top of the panel under a Throughput heading, ahead of the ones that only change the look. Voxel size, radii, counts, quality and the cap toggles that lift them all live there now
- Several tooltips were describing the opposite of what the program does, including two that had both the default and the direction backwards. Those are corrected
- Slider names are being made consistent across modes, so the same idea carries the same name wherever you meet it