Houdini’s new Crowd Procedural LOP provides a render-time optimization that reduces the amount of unique skinned geometry generated, improving the memory usage and performance of large crowds. See this workflow guide for more information.

Several enhancements have been made to the SOP Import LOP, resulting in a 5-6x performance improvement when importing large crowds to USD.

On the SOP Character Import LOP, the Subframe Sampling parameters from the Cache LOP are now exposed for easier configuration of samples for motion blur.

The SOP Crowd Import LOP now exposes the Boolean Attributes configuration parameter from the SOP Import LOP.

On the Crowd MotionPath Transition SOP, new parameters have been added that allow you to adjust the initial clip time of the new animation clip when the clip transition graph is not being used.

On the Crowd MotionPath Avoid SOP, the Speed Threshold parameter specifies the minimum speed at which steering changes can be applied. This can prevent agents from spinning around while at a low speed.

On the Agent Edit SOP, Agent Clip Layer DOP, Crowd State DOP, and Crowd Trigger DOP, a VEXpression menu and spare parameter creation button has been added to the VEXpression snippet parameter.