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

What’s new in Solaris

The Layout node lets you place, scatter, paint, and edit point instances using a powerful interface.

You can design custom brushes for the Layout node based on a SOP network.

New asset gallery pane type lets you maintain a library of USD component assets for use with the Layout tool.

The Scene Import LOP converts traditional Houdini Object-level scenes to USD. You can write plugins to convert object types to USD prims, for example for custom light objects associated with a proprietary renderer.

Component builder tool creates a network snippet for building a USD component layer from SOP geometry with lots of support for best practices and features like variants, embedded materials, and display and collison proxies.

Restructure Scene Graph is an advanced LOP capable of renaming, reparenting, and removing operations on a flattened layer stack.

Modify Paths lets you modify asset-path attribute values.

Copy Properties lets you rename prim properties, or copy values between prims.

Updated USD library to version 21.08.
The Solaris viewer now shows selection as a yellow outline rather than coloring the entire object.
The Houdini OpenGL delegate is much faster at drawing transformable instances, and thousands of light/camera guides.
Resample Transforms LOP uses existing time samples to generate better motion blur for primitives with fast transforms (especially rotations).
The Graft Branches LOP can now set the branch to inherit from the source instead of the destination.
Add Variant has an integer context option, VARIANTINPUT, which corresponds to each secondary input to the node.
Asset Reference now has controls for variants.
The Instancer LOP now adds inputs: prefix when instancing Lights, and has a streamlined parameter interface.
You can now overlay a foreground image in front of the Solaris viewport.
New tree matching pattern syntax features. New function-like syntax %kind(component). You can use patterns as “arguments”:

%ancestors(%kind(component) & /path/geo/**).

Many new and improved match types.
Primitive patterns in LOP nodes now match pure override prims on the stage.
You can now “bake” the viewport overrides into an Inline USD node in the network.
The viewer can now load and show payloads even if they are marked unloaded in the scene data.

New selection options for selecting specific Kinds.
More consistent behavior of T/R/E/Enter hotkeys for editing prims in the viewer.
Improved snapping UI.
New button in the display toolbar to temporarily pause viewer updates.
You can now choose a different render purpose, viewport overrides, and load mask for each renderer.
SOP network import now uses SOP-level material assignments, has improved volume support.
The importer can now track object existence over time and author equivalent visibility changes on the USD prim.
New versions of LOP Import SOP and Unpack USD SOP for importing USD back into SOPs.
Configure Primitive can mark prims as “not editable”. You can use this to prevent accidentally moving a camera/light while the view is locked to it.
The ⇥ Tab menu in the viewer now only shows LOP-related tools, not the entire contents of the default tabs.
The test geometry nodes now reference USD layer files, rather than translating SOP output, for better performance.
New VEX functions for tracking prim specifiers and computing inherited primvars.
Support for the USD camera’s exposure attribute.
Implicit prototypes now appear in the scene tree.
Scene graph details pane now shows material assignments and allows navigation to materials.
You can now pin commonly accessed prims to the top of the scene graph tree.
Auto-expanding the scene graph tree to show all selected prims is now optional. You can choose instead to color closed branches with selected prims inside differently.
The scene graph tree respects the IsHidden() metadata on USD primitives, which is intended to hide utility primitives from user interfaces.