Houdini 20.5 What’s new What’s new in Houdini 19

What’s new Modeling and Geometry

New user-friendly Curve drawing tool with Bezier handles and automatic rounded corners.

New default material for Terrain visualizes 10 different layers instead of 3.

Heightfield Layer Property has new compression options.

Heightfield Paint has new soft edge controls, and quick access to tools through hotkeys.

The Volume Deform Node and Lattice From Volume let you use deformation SOPs (such as Bend and Soft Transform) to rehape volumes.

New versions of the UV Flatten and UV Layout nodes.

Improved interactivity in UV editing nodes.

Better support for GLTF transfer. The GLTF SOP node now defaults to loading by Scene (Load By parameter). It can now add a primitive attribute to imported geometry which stores the path to the GLTF node. It now supports ambient occlusion textures.

The GLTF ROP and ROP GLTF Output SOP nodes outputs many more features, and has quality-of-life improvements such as pre- and post-render scripts.

New File Cache 2.0 is extremely useful in common workflows where you want to cache the input and from then on use the cache instead of cooking the input.
Specify when SOP nodes cook or cache with the new low-level Cache If SOP utility node. This allows you to perform SOP network optimizations based on geometry attribute data IDs.
New Remesh to Grid SOP.
Attribute Adjust Color, Attribute Adjust Dictionary, Attribute Adjust Float, Attribute Adjust Integer, Attribute Adjust Vector, Volume Adjust Fog, Volume Noise Fog, Volume Noise SDF, Volume Noise Vector nodes.
Improved TopoTransfer SOP. Topotransfer no longer requires connected geometry. You can mask rigid areas, and see surface textures while editing.
Improved PolyExtrude.
UV Edit now uses the viewer’s current UV attribute name.
New Circle Spline SOP.
Many more SOPs are compile-able verbs.

Improved speed and stability for selections.
Better primitive snapping.
Many bug fixes in viewer drawing and interaction.
Match Axis now transforms attributes.
Edge Collapse handles vertex attributes better.
New Attribute Fill node.
New Attribute Combine.
Improved Attribute Transfer.
New Volume Normalize Weights is useful for normalizing heightfield masks.
Alembic support updated to 1.7.16. More tolerant of unexpected changes to Alembic archives on disk. New Alembic HOM extensions method to get child object hash. Improved naming for Alembic camera nodes. Handle archives with unknown node types. Many bug fixes.