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

What’s new Modeling

The Sculpt SOP is now version 2.0 to enhance Character FX and general sculpting workflows. It features new brushes, stroke types, masking controls, a reworked interactive viewport state, and non-destructive workflow. Built to handle meshes with several million polygons at interactive speeds.

New Laplacian SOP node computes a discrete Laplacian matrix for the input mesh.
New Planar Inflate SOP node inflates the surface of the input polygon to generate a 3D triangle mesh.

New Proximity SOP creates various new attributes on the candidate points to let you work with the nearest points in subsequent nodes, such as a point attribute containing each point’s distance to the closest target.
The Clip 2.0 SOP has a new state to draw the clipping plane as a line in the viewport.

The Point Cloud Measure SOP interprets the geometric signatures of unorganized points without needing to convert them into a surface or volume.

The 3D shape of each point neighborhood is measured and used to transform its instanced sphere. Animated horse asset courtesy of Bogdan Lazar - Wafe VFX

(BETA) The Quad Remesh builds a mesh of quads (four-sided polygons) with the same shape as the input surface, but as quads and better edge flow.

The Curve SOP can now copy-paste curves in the Curve state and has improved picking of NURBS curve segments.
Added a uniform scale parameter and options to override with an attribute in the Path Deform SOP and Chain SOP.
Added a button to Path Deform SOP to initialize the geometry alignment with the curve start orientation.
Added a Group Highlight shelf tool for selecting and highlighting groups of points, primitives, vertices or edges.
The Scatter and Align SOP will now blend to target normal direction without introducing twists.
The Pack SOP can now be either a string or integer attribute for partitioning to create Packed Fragment primitives.
The Attribute Copy SOP now takes less time to cook. The Copy Data parameter, when turned off, can create attributes on the destination without copying the actual values.
The Attribute Mirror SOP has a new Mirroring Method mode with new options such as topology and use mapping. Also, a new viewer state to visualize mirror.
New primitive snapping mode to snap to the tangent plane while translating along a single axis.
The Soft Peak SOP is now compilable (verbified) with any SOPS that can use verbs.
New OpenCL option added to the Volume Blur SOP.
The new Volume Sharpen tool creates a sharpen strength parameter that connects the pre or post add parameters to its proper values and performs an unsharp mask.