Animation
- APEX (All-Purpose Execution) architecture for fast rig creation and evaluation
- APEX-driven rigging and animation toolset within KineFX: BETA
- High-performance procedural rigging framework
- Growing set of readily available auto-rigging tools
- APEX rigging network editor with unique debugging capabilities
- Efficient packed geometry format to encode entire animation scene
- Dedicated animation environment for characters rigged with APEX
- In-viewport access to all essential animation tools
- Toolbar with animator-friendly sliders e.g. key blending and resampling
- Many UX and functionality enhancements to animation graph view
- Natively integrated motion dynamics and ragdolls
- Powerful, one-click pivot setting for fast posing
- Quick and seamless switching between IK and “fake” FK
- Flexible, animator-friendly “velcro” constraint system
- Animation bookmarks on playbar and in animation graph view
- Selection Sets with easy control and access directly in viewport
- Fully customizable python interaction and rigging controls
- Hotkey and radial menus for quick access to functionality
- Dem Bones Skinning Converter SOP
- Auto-generated MikkT tangents and normals for glTF and FBX import
- Joint scaling removal option for FBX export
- Smoothing group support for FBX SOPs and ROPs
- DCC export presets for FBX Animation Output and FBX Character Output
- ML skinning with scripts, networks and training dataset In Content Library
Feathers & Fur
- High performance, GPU-accelerated feathering framework
- End-to-end feather modelling, grooming, shading and rendering
- Procedural and art-directable with state-of-the-art viewport tools
- Fast creation of single feather template or entire plumage
- Interactive noise and clumping controls for barbs and barbules
- Finely granular controls for barb shape, distribution and orientation
- Advanced feather technology for fast packing and detangling
- Plumage setup ideal for out-of-the-box Vellum simulation
- Feather Procedural for USD rendering: Karma & 3rd parties
- Export-ready plumage for game engine deployment
- Memory-efficient feather data representation
- Shared guide grooming toolset for both feathers and fur
- Designed to work seamlessly with the new Texture Mask Paint brushes
- Fur shader with medulla support
- Muscles & Tissue: GOLD
- Franken Muscle technique for faster and more robust setup and simulation
- Fast “coupled” Vellum solve for tet-stretch with superior volume preservation
- Finer controls on muscle interconnectivity constraints
- Enhancements to muscle flexing and activation
- Easier way to attach skin to tetrahedral mesh
- Improvements to skin sliding constraints
Crowds
- Constantly expanding toolset, now more artist-friendly at SOP level
- Motion Path SOP to interactively modify one or more agent trajectories
- Greatly improved collision detection and avoidance
- Support for sticky collisions and projectile motion
- Options to control clip-time behaviour e.g. Phase and Relative to Start Time
- Ability to store clip transition graph geometry in agent definition
- Easier way to retrieve specific agent shapes with Agent Unpack SOP
- Pattern matching with Agent Edit SOP
- Agent Pose from Rig SOP compilable for faster performance
- Support for UsdSkel dual quaternion skinning
Dynamics
- Whitewater and bubbles support for existing SOP-level FLIP fluid solver
- FLIP Volume Combine SOP to mix FLIP fields of different resolutions
- Efficient multigrid preconditioner for pressure projection
- Ability to generate non-intersecting bubble structures
- OpenCL Ripple Solver SOP for shallow water and deforming 3D geometry
- Projectile and Pendulum Motion SOPs for typical throw and swing scenarios
- Fast and versatile RBD Sticky collision constraints e.g. for crowds
- Cone twist constraints with drivable Car Rig setup in Content Library
- Curved glass fracturing in RBD Material Fracture
- Much faster graph colouring for tetrahedral meshes
- Vellum wind occlusion/shadow for more accurate wind blocking
- Finer masking controls for transition effects with Vellum Rest Blend
- Ability to simulate Vellum fluids with 64-bit precision accuracy
- Interactive pin handles in Vellum Brush for easy fold, drape and stretch
- Volume sharpening of pyro fields for more realistic results
- Density-based terminal velocity for more realistic pyro such as falling dust
- Redesigned modular Karma pyro shader with convenient presets
- Seamless volume looping with colour and velocity blending in SideFX Labs
- Linear Solver SOP to perform many useful linear algebra operations
- OpenCL Snippet operators for faster FX development akin to VEX Wranglers
- OpenCL support for binding topology attributes and groups for R/W
- Ability to write in-place VDBs with OpenCL
- Gas OpenCL node Improvements
Clouds
- Artist-friendly toolset for skybox and hero cloud generation in SOPs
- Billowy and Wispy Cloud Noise to help achieve highly realistic looks
- Cloud-driven enhancements to Attribute Noise and Volume Noise Fog
- Ability to quickly generate clouds from geometric shapes
- Cloud Clip SOP with viewport handles to shape the extent of a cloud
- Sky Box SOP: a one-stop shop to produce 3D cloudscapes very fast
- Sky Field from Map to produce 2D cloudscapes using existing image
- Dedicated Karma shader designed with modularity in mind
- Optimized Karma CPU and XPU volumetric rendering
- Easily adjustable cloud density for rendering
Solaris
- USD Material Catalog framework
- Much Improved material assignment/linking UX
- Growing support for MaterialX for shader development
- Native MaterialX/Karma catalog of handy materials e.g. skin and car paint
- Volume materials with presets for explosion, fire, smoke and clouds
- Volume Ambient Occlusion SOP to bake out volume for much faster rendering
- Ocean Procedural (foam, bubbles & real displacements) for all USD renderers
- Improved Hair/Fur Procedural for all USD renderers
- RBD Destruction LOP to transform pieces at render time via invoke graphs
- Karma Physical Sky LOP with Karma Sky Dome and distant sun lights
- Scene Doctor LOP to analyze, alert and repair problems in USD scene
- Geometry Clip Sequence LOP to simplify workflows around value clips
- Many enhancements to Snapshot/Render Gallery e.g. capturing all AOVs
- UI/UX improvements to the Scene Graph tree menu & details
- Better UX In the interactive Camera LOP state
- Light/Camera viewport guides with new custom display tech under the hood
- Distributed multi-frame and multi-shot rendering via “cloning”
- Improvements to Husk procedural framework
- Optimized Merge LOP performance
- Enhanced USD and LOP support in TOPs
- USD 23.08 and MaterialX 1.38.8
Karma CPU & XPU
- Absorption and dispersion
- Filmic tone mapping
- Automatic ray biasing
- Point cloud shader with fast lookup
- Improved rotational motion blur
- Physical sky system with dedicated dome light
- Optimized deep camera maps (DCM)
- Improved handling of internal reflections
- Advanced fur shader based on medulla properties
- Hex Tile shader to minimize edge tiling artifacts
- Room Map/Parallax shader to give appearance of depth
- All-purpose MaterialX pyro shader for smoke, fire, explosions and clouds
- Improved memory performance for subdivision surfaces: OSD 3.6
- Render Stats framework with special GUI and custom reporting capabilities
- Updated 3rd party denoiser support: Intel and NVidia
- Extensive OCIO enhancements throughout Houdini
- ACES colour space support
- Full Cryptomatte support
- Karma XPU: GOLD
- All the shared Karma CPU & XPU features above, plus:
- Robust multi-GPU architecture with failsafe out-of-core capabilities
- Countless speed and memory optimizations
- Nested dielectrics
- Instance variation
- Physical lens shader
- Rounded edge shader
- Light active radius support
- Volumes as first class objects: AOVs, LPEs, light linking…
- Efficient rendering of uniform volumes and frustum volumes
- Support for additional AOVs, including Cryptomatte
- Lighting: geo lights, portals, IES profiles, light filters, better sampling
- Ability to mix MaterialX standard surface shaders
- BSDF refactoring for much faster execution
- Efficient loading and eviction of tiled textures
- Highly optimized texture management
- USD Coordsys support
- Full colourspace support
- Deep outputs
3D Viewports
- Support for background video
- Redesigned custom guides framework
- Option to always display the name of the current node or tool
- Comprehensive set of customizable interactive HUDs in the viewport
- Complete redesign of drag-and-drop parameter HUD sliders
- More powerful and flexible hotkey override schema
- Better hotkey binding support for international keyboards
- Enhanced precision in selecting geometry
- New Vulkan engine: experimental-only in this release
PDG & TOP Task Management
- Services now available to PDG Command Chains
- Convenient, workflow-enhancing TOPS for Machine Learning training
- Programmable methods for stopping and restarting specific service clients
- Ability to write custom PDG nodes In C++ in addition to python
- Rolling checkpointing format to periodically save & restore TOP graph state
- Support for registering preflight handler to be invoked before graph cooking
- High demand Processor TOPs e.g. OpenImageIO and Filter by Attribute
- Performance and quality-of-life optimizations to Schedulers
- Ability to control maximum memory usage of task processes
- Recorded memory usage for all tasks that finished cooking
- Many UI/UX enhancements to TOP Interactive environment
- Additional API and env-var support for debugging PDG networks
- Text Input TOP to complement existing Text Output TOP
- SSL support In the Message Queue server
- Colourspace controls and codec selection menu in FFmpeg Encode Video TOP
- USD Analyze TOP to fetch metadata, dependencies and external refs
- USD Render Scene TOP to render USD file on disk or a LOP network
- Many TOP enhancements to USD Importing
Houdini Engine / Plugins / HQueue Platforms
- HEngine sample application to facilitate learning
- HEngine support for dictionary attributes
- Optimizations to attribute handling in HE engine
- HEngine plugin support for UE 5.3 with World Partitions
- UE Landscape Spline import and export
- UE Skeletal Mesh and Animation import and export
- Reference counted input system with condensed types and UI redesign
- macOS Apple Silicon Support for UE 5.2+
- HEngine plugin support for Unity’s Splines package via new Spline Input Type
- Many Karma and USD integration enhancements to HQueue
- Improvements to ROPs and TOPs in HQueue e.g. platform-specific HFS paths
- Performance Monitor enhancements including startup time tracking
- Full adherence to VFX Reference Platform CY2023 specifications
- New Houdini video framework built on FFmpeg: v6.O,O
- Broader OpenColorIO support including Python bindings
- Python 3.10 default and 3.9 separate download
Geometry & Terrain
- Powerful and robust multigrid surfacing of massive point cloud data
- Point cloud reduction and normal computation
- Fast quad remesher with mirroring and guiding for non-CAD geometry: BETA
- Improved Topo Transfer SOP for texture map baking and UX
- Topo Flow SOP for 4D processing of scanned poses using optical flow
- UX and functionality enhancements to curve drawing e.g. soft transform
- Property editing of previously “stroke” drawn freeform curves
- Group Inversion SOP to create complementary group of geo elements
- Thickness measuring SOP using ray length or max fitting sphere
- Poly Hinge SOP to extrude polygonal faces around a pivot line
- Ability to flatten geometry procedurally
- Viewport Drawables and HUD enhancements
- Procedural and interactive 3D Texture Mask Paint toolset
- Ability to import texture flies as 2D volumes
- Option to use 2D volumes as input to Attribute From Map
- Ability to create vector and integer volumes
- Better gap closing/preservation in VDB from Polygons
- Support for frustum-shaped heightfields
- Ability to sharpen heightfields with Heightfield Blur
- Advanced biome creation toolset, including roads and terrain, in SideFX Labs
- ML terrain generation examples in Content Library
- …And a foundational SOP & TOP toolset for Machine Learning using ONNX
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