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

What’s new Viewport, user interface, and scripting

New support for writing custom Python handles. New viewer handle code generator sets up boilerplate code for you to fill in. New examples in the Viewer Handle Demo package.

Added support to digital assets for implementing/persisting Python viewer handles.

Improved hou.Drawable functionality including transparent drawing.

Initial implementation of a “heads up display” information overlay API for the viewer. Your custom Python state can display and update its own HUD info panel.

Future versions of Houdini will expand the usefulness and power of this feature.

New look for collapsible sections in parameter editor.

New parameter interface design capabilities: checkboxes on section headers, representative parameters on collapsed section headers, icons in menus, and icon-only menu buttons.

The View tool now supports a “flythrough” first-person naviation mode using the WASD keys and mouse-look.

The default download now uses Python 3. If you are still working on updating to modern Python, you can choose to download an alternate build that still uses Python 2.7.

  • The viewer now shows selection as a yellow outline rather than coloring the entire object or the wireframe.

  • The OpenGL viewer now supports light bloom, halo effects, and cascading shadows from distant lights.

  • Support for overlaying a foreground image in front of the view.

  • At the SOP level, if a surface has a UV attribute no textures, the viewer shades the surface with a UV visualization texture.

  • There is also a shading mode that shades everything with the UV visualization texture.

  • The viewer uses MikkT-style tangentu and tangentv attributes for normal mapping if present on display geometry.

  • Improved VEX editor: line numbers, font size zooming, better selection.

  • You can now adjust the field of view of the default view camera.

  • Better HDR antialiasing of super-bright edges in HQ lighting.

  • You can now optionally display lighting on particle spheres.

  • Better volume rendering, including tricubic interpolation, improved lighting, and ambient shadows.

  • Seamless display of volumes with volumetric fog.

  • Faster textured material rendering and background texture loading at the Object level.

  • Faster display of scenes with thousands of objects.

  • New mask mode allows fast rendering of cutout textures.

  • You can now automatically set the clipping planes based on the scene bounds while tumbling.

  • Support for EDR values on macOS. This improves the color fidelity on Apple Pro Display XDR monitors.

  • Houdini now has a common logging system, and a new pane type for viewing the log events.

  • Updated Qt libraries to version 5.15.

What’s new in Houdini 19