With more artists this software will have great synergy in evolution and i see hope for that!
- Better UI for keyframe animators - similar to Cascadeur one!
- Camera sequencer, better camera rigs and settings, light sequencer.
- Option for Importing NURBS from modeling software called Plasticity, with possibility of animation it (to every element like shape or point), and then render without losing NURBS quality.
- Option to work with NeRFs, allowing you to hand paint them (every feauture fe. Opacity or rotation of points) project textures, making NeRF materials - usefull for relighting. apply geometry modifiers, and animate it in easy way, hell.. mayby even rig it using bones and APEX? . Basically, everything that was possible with meshes but now using NeRFs. NeRFs are the new mesh converting NeRF to particles so VFX could be done with NerRF and exported to game engine.
- NanoVDB !
- Housecleaning of Houdini, new UI (artist friendly look and functionality), enhancments for dvelopers for quicker bug fixing Python errors, new UI for animators!
- Better looking gizmos with enhaned functionality (its not 1999 anymore)
- Spectral rendering in Karma XPU, also introducing Neural rendering.
And more Tool level wishes:
Stroke recorder in TIME – a tool where you can record changes to geometry, color, or any other parameter, using Wacom tablets with pressure or touch sensitivity.
You could then edit those strokes in a UI similar to editing software like Adobe After Effects or DaVinci Resolve. You could group paint strokes together, stretch them over time, fuse parameters and perform other non-linear animation operations.
I see Houdini as a platform that fuses everything together using .USD (kind of Nvidia Omniverse vision but fck big corpos xD, where quick fixes and tweaks should be easy to make by hand. This non-destructive stroke recorder could help with that. It would also be a cool tool to experiment with motion design. Something similar to OTOY's Sculptron.
Maybe you could paint with entire takes? Like applying changes of values using hand with Wacom tablet to all nodes ("take" is this dropdown menu on top right) ? I'm not sure
.