Expanse is a new system built for Unreal Engine 5 that revolutionizes the way artists work with smoke, clouds, fire, fog, and broadly, all things ephemeral and fluid.
VDB files are huge—every 3D artist knows that. So we invented a new way to compress them by 50x, on your disk and inside your GPU.
Uncompressed (1.23 GB)
Compressed (26 MB, 47x)
But that's only half the problem. Volumetrics devour frame time. So we invented new PBR techniques to speed things up by orders of magnitude without sacrificing quality.
Path Tracing (~2 minutes)
Expanse Cinematic Quality (~5 ms, 36,000x faster)
The result? You can freely paint with volumetric elements to create interactive, never-before-seen looks in real-time; for film VFX, architecture visualization, and of course, for video games.
