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