Merge fVDB into OpenVDB

[fwilliams]

𝑓VDB: A Deep-Learning Framework for Sparse, Large-Scale, and High-Performance Spatial Intelligence

fVDB is a novel GPU-optimized framework for deep learning on large-scale 3D data. It provides a complete set of differentiable primitives to build deep learning architectures for common tasks in 3D learning such as convolution, pooling, attention, ray-tracing, meshing, etc.

fVDB simultaneously provides a much larger feature set (primitives and operators) than established frameworks with no loss in efficiency: our operators match or exceed the performance of other frameworks with narrower scope. Furthermore, fVDB can process datasets with much larger footprint and spatial resolution than prior works, while providing a competitive memory footprint on small inputs. To achieve this combination of versatility and performance, fVDB relies on the novel NanoVDB index grid acceleration structure paired with several key innovations including GPU accelerated sparse grid construction, convolution using tensor cores, fast ray tracing kernels using a Hierarchical Digital Differential Analyzer algorithm (HDDA), and jagged tensors.

Our framework is fully integrated with PyTorch enabling interoperability with existing pipelines, and we demonstrate its effectiveness on a number of representative tasks such as large-scale point-cloud segmentation, high resolution 3D generative modeling, unbounded scale Neural Radiance Fields, and large-scale point cloud reconstruction.

Crucially, fVDB has no external dependencies outside the OpenVDB repository other than PyTorch, and it is fully optional (in the same way that NanoVDB and Houdini extensions are).

There is an associated SIGGRAPH paper describing the technical details of fVDB which will be released soon.

[linux-foundation-easycla]

The committers listed above are authorized under a signed CLA.

• ✅ login: kmuseth / name: Ken Museth (5bc540d, 02ec97a)
• ✅ login: fwilliams / name: Francis Williams (1cce95c, ccdfe0c, f006533)