DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. is an American animation studio based in Glendale, California that creates animated feature films, television programs, and online virtual worlds. They have released a total of twenty-five feature films, including the franchises of Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, and How to Train Your Dragon. On wednesday, DreamWorks released its latest animated feature with the holiday-themed Rise of the Guardians. 
There is another good news that the studio released onto the open market one of the primary tools used to create Rise of the Guardians. The software, known as OpenVDB, allows animators to create “volumetric” effects, such as smoke and other amorphous materials. “DreamWorks Animation’s technology in the hands of our artists has created our rich, iconic characters and worlds. Our OpenVDB technology in particular has been the focus of intense industry interest,” said Dr. Lincoln Wallen, Head of Animation Technology at DreamWorks Animation. “We have benefitted from using Open Source, and we are pleased to contribute back into the Open Source community in sharing OpenVDB.”
DreamWorks Animation began development of OpenVDB several years ago and has extended and improved it over the course of several feature film productions. Within the studio, OpenVDB was rapidly adopted as a key technology for effects on features such as Puss in Boots and Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted. 
DreamWorks’s OpenVDB is “faster and requires less data” than existing software to depict amorphous materials, according to Yancy Lindquist, head of effects on “Guardians.” It is a C++ library comprising a novel hierarchical data structure and a suite of tools for the efficient storage and manipulation of sparse volumetric data discretized on three-dimensional grids. Just buy!
