Brains and Explosions: A Simple VDB Writer for Python

VDB is a volumetric data format. Commonly used in films and video-games, it is also great for rendering scientific data. However, the current open source standard is poorly documented, requires a docker container to run, and contains a ton of code that is unneeded outside of niche graphics applications. As a result, many scientific visualization artists must rely on closed-source commercial software: leading to citation and reproducibility issues. To solve these problems, I built Neurovolume: a low-dependency, Python library for writing VDBs. This talk spans Zig/Python interoperability, satellite data, big spinning magnets, dead salmon, and Blender plugins.