Firstly, it is recommended to follow the following steps to complete the VDB optimization settings
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If you need to add a large number of VDB clouds in a scene, you may notice a significant slowdown in rendering speed. In such cases, you can optimize the performance by adjusting the settings in the Volumes panel.
First, locate the Step Rate Render and Step Rate Viewport options.
Set the Step Rate Render and Step Rate Viewport values to 10. This will greatly improve your rendering speed.
<aside> 💡 The Step Rate Render affects the final rendering speed, while the Step Rate Viewport affects the preview rendering speed. Adjusting these values can help optimize the performance when working with a large number of VDB clouds.
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You can see that by adjusting the Step Rate Render from the default value of 1 to 0, the rendering speed has been reduced by approximately 72%. Although there may be some slight changes in shadow details on the VDB clouds, the quality sacrifice is not significant.
Of course, you can also choose to adjust it to 5, which slightly increases the rendering time but provides better rendering quality while still maintaining speed.
Since using VDB is straightforward, you simply need to drag the desired cloud into your scene, place it where you want, and adjust its size and rotation. Here is a video demonstration of the actual process without further explanations.