OctaneRender® can render level set surfaces, including those from VDBs, without first converting them to meshes.
Below is a rendering of the famed XYZRGB Dragon based on the level set surfaces made available by the original scanned range sets.
Figure 1: Level set surface rendering of the XYZRGB Dragon
Figure 2: Level set surface rendering of the VDBDreamworks’ open-source C++ library housing the data structures and tools implementation for storing and manipulating volume data, like smoke and other amorphous materials. The purpose of OpenVDB is mostly to have an efficient way to store volumetric data in memory and on disk. It has evolved into a more general toolkit that also lets you accomplish other things, such as fracturing volumes, converting meshes to volumes and vice versa. However, it does not include a computational fluid dynamics solver, and therefore it cannot procedurally generate smoke or fire. OpenVDB is fully integrated as a library in OctaneRender. For more information about OpenVDB, please see http://www.openvdb.org/. level sets of the Stanford Bunny
The level sets also work with Vectron, which allows you to add Procedural effects over surfaces defined by VDB level sets.
Figure 3: A modified OSL texture that adds Procedural effects to level set surfaces
Figure 4: An example of a Procedural displacement added on surfaces defined by VDB level sets