Scene Graph Tree can enable or disable “Panes Follow Current Node” behavior. This button is a shortcut for the preference with the same name.

Render Region tool added to Solaris viewport.

Scene Graph Tree and Scene Graph Details highlight the row sitting beneath the mouse cursor.

Light Mixer UI improvements.

It is now easy to set the output image resolution based on the camera’s aperture size. See the Karma render node and the Render Settings and Render Product LOP nodes.

Houdini Procedurals generate procedural geometry as a pre-render process for rendering USD in husk. This version of Houdini includes two procedurals. Houdini Procedurals Hair LOP generates render-time hair from guide curves and skin prims. The Preview Houdini Procedurals LOP previews Houdini procedurals interactively.

Reference 2.0 LOP can now import multiple references and use wildcards.

Edit Prototypes LOP allows artists to edit instance prototypes in-place.

Isolate Scene LOP automatically sets up load masks to make working in heavy scenes easier.

Light Filter Library LOP manages Karma Light Filter shaders and MaterialX nodes.

Motion Blur LOP - wrapper around the new Cache LOP to simplify caching enough data for motion blur.

File Cache LOP - new node for generating inline disk caches.

Match Size LOP - similar to the SOP node, for matching and centering prims and models.

Cache 2.0 LOP - expanded to support efficiently caching subframe samples.

Coordinate System LOP - create named coordinate systems for shading networks.

Karma Cryptomatte LOP - simplifies the discovery and setup of Cryptomatte AOVs for Karma.

New Karma Ocean LOP renders ocean spectra and foam with Karma CPU. This node is created and linked automatically by the Small Ocean and Large Ocean shelf tools.

Asset Reference will detect when a USD asset’s up axis is different from the current Houdini scene, and automatically rotate the asset and align it with the world up axis.

Simple Merge style added to the Merge LOP, and is now the default. This new mode flattens all LOP-authored layers into the active layer, making all sublayers from disk or from SOPs weaker than this combined LOP layer.

Instancer LOP sets 'group' kind by default, and also excludes creating primvars for the instancing attributes (@P, @N, @up, and @orient)

Layout now has Stack and Paint brushes.

Layout LOP can also edit existing point instancers.

Renamed Edit Prototype to Assign Prototypes, clarifying its function of switching the prototypes used by an instance.

Component Output has a second input, for providing a camera and lights when generating thumbnails.

Component Material is much more interactive, especially for heavier shader counts coming from the second input. Simple cases (~10 shaders) are 25-50% faster, and more complex shading networks (~700 shaders) improve 14x, when compared to Houdini 19.

Material Library is much more efficient translating nested subnetworks of VOP nodes.

Boolean types are handled as int in Edit Material Network.

Initial “preview” version of the Karma User Guide, a guide to using and optimizing Houdini’s Karma renderer.

Camera LOP now has a dedicated Aspect Ratios menu, instead of re-using the existing resolution menu.

Many LOP nodes can now cache multiple time-samples in a single cook. This reduces the number of Houdini time dependencies, and makes USD exports, renders, and interactivity generally faster. Affected nodes include the Transform and Edit Properties LOPs. The speedup also applies to assets that use Edit Properties.

USD ROP and USD Render ROPs now emit a standard set of context options, which can be used in node networks to control behavior when exporting. These can sometimes be used instead of the traditional Houdini frame variables, to avoid introducing Houdini time dependencies.

USD Render ROP presents more options available to the husk command line tool, such as overriding resolution and enabling legacy EXR mode.

New Output Processor added, to allow localizing non-USD assets (texture maps, VDB files, etc…) to a specific directory.

Scene Import now translates SOP-level material assignments.

SOP Import has a new Bind Materials parameter. This post-process converts @usdmaterialpath attributes on the imported prims into direct material bindings.

Added a control to disable prefixing any created geomsubsets with the string attribute’s name.

Errors from the referenced SOP node are propagated to the SOP Import LOP.

@usdactive attribute can be used to set activate state of a primitive in SOPs.

SOP Modify LOP is clearer when static or animated time samples are being imported into SOPs.

SOP Import now uses the agent’s rest pose for the USD skeleton’s rest Transforms attribute.

In primitive pattern syntax, some %bound(), %closerthan(), %fartherthan(), and %visible() now take a time argument to compute membership at a specific time (to take account for animated properties such as visibility).

You can now use %type() to match an applied API Schema.

Updated USD library to version 22.05.

Improved USD nodes in PDG.