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