LukeP
- Continue to enhance Vulcan VP - should be faster than OpenGL, not slower? maybe evolve into RT renderer?

LukeP
- Fast FLIP fluids please
- Time to maybe enhance / redo particle sim and nodes?
- Sparse OpenCL solver please!
- Switch to CPU when run out of GPU memory vs crash

LukeP
- NVidia Neural VDB support

LukeP
- Rewrite the docs - solid concepts foundation, talk about how nodes can be used with each other, explain parameters in a humanoid friendly way

LukeP
NeRFs integration… would have to think about it some more, but feels like there’s an opportunity here

• Karma Baker with auto setups values using intersection analysis between the LP and HP and automatic adaptive cages
  
• Start building a more extensive noise library for COPs with smart materials and generators.
  
• After the aforementioned, lay the foundations for a node-based texture painting workflow that rivals Substance Painter with nodes like the Entagma ones for layering or leaking simulation.
  
• APEX Scene Modeling
  
• Sculpt 3.0 (one iteration more on this pls). With the ability to sculpt directly on normal map like Cozy Blanket/Uniform (No high poly meshes, no retopo, no baking, big deal).
  
• Custom COPs brushes support for Path SOP, with some sidefx presets to paint stitches, zippers, fabric and welding seams (SP).
  
• Simulation Brushes for sculpting
  
• UV Blend Shapes (like blender Animall addon)
  
• Geometry Library Rewrite
  
• More appealing subd modeling. Idk why but setting the render flag on the subd node while templating the unsubdivided geo isn't comfortable. Maybe an interactive mode in the subd node to edit the "cage" would do the trick.
  
• Specific nodes to wrap and encourage the use of SDF modeling and kitbashing like the Dominik Lange and chakshuvfx plugin
  
• Procedural NURBS Modeling. Once someone in the world develops such a thing, even AI will have a hard time surpassing it. Furthermore, parametric modeling is less destructive than polygonal, minimizes manual tweaking which is closer to Houdini's idea. A workflow example would be: convert to nurbs > bevel > convert back to poly, this way u would steal the most envied feature of Plasticity (which is the NURBS beveling). Another killer feature to start with would be nurbs lofting and bridge edges for surface modeling.
  
• A pretty standard surface material shader, similar to the one in Blender, and tweaking Vulkan settings to resemble the MODO advanced viewport would also help with the look and feel.
  
• Shortcut Concatenation (blender) would be a good idea to reduce friction between the user and the viewport. eg: typing g+x+value(move+axis_constraint+amount) or R+R to rotate with the trackball.
  
• Component sensitive nodes.
  
• More snapping presets for the pie menu would also help improve the modeling mode.
  
• Interactive flag (maybe replacing the not so used frozen flag?). Why? (1) To know a node has an interactive mode and which ones do not. (2) To indicate that you are currently in the interactive mode of that node. (3) To avoid the need to lift your left hand to press Enter or Escape. (4) To feel in control of your process.
  
• Holding alt+mmb while orbiting to snap to different orthographic views (plasticity). Or even better, 'snap to closest orthographic view', which allows you to map all planes to one key (MODO)
  
• Symmetry selections and select similar.
  
• Group aliases. eg: select ring, fill selection, select from relative bbox (from top/mid/bot), select line (which is a select loop but smarter enough to stop at corners)...
  
• Kill OBJ level, no software has 2 obj lvl.
  
• Seamless interoperability with UE5 through USD and Mtlx (mtlx should translate to substrata definition on import).
  
• Vulkan ROP
  
• Further expand the component builder workflow.
  
• Layout node performance improvement.
  
• Pure Mtlx (non-karma specific) skin, ocean, white water, pyro, cloud and toon/anime shaders.
  
• XPU Solvers.
  
• UI Refresh: more responsive, modernized skin and dynamic tab arrangement.
  
• More Gaea like nodes for the terrain suite. eg: shorelines, craters...(btw Jake Rice has the code for the Aperature node on his git)
  
• Scales tools like the ones from Wout Tengrootenhuysen but leveraging the new feather's guide system and painting on UVs
  
• Ivy tools like the ones from MCworldKit
  
• Clothing tools for mimicking the most common workflows of Marvelous Designer and help with garment creation.
  
• Add a Braid SOP to the grooming suite (blender)
  
• Update Hair Card Generate SOP to work with feathers. Additionally, explore UE Nanite Spline Meshes for nanite feathers.
  
• Continue to bring valuable things hidden in networks to SOP level. Example: to use a simple geometry CHOP you have to create a CHOPnet, a channel node, dive inside, use a Geometry node (specify the SOP path) and then use the actual node (...) 4 nodes and one lvl down to do a noise filter... Therefore, bring geometry CHOPs into SOPs for straightforward use.
  
• Animation filters like the jiggles from christopher rutledge
  
• Refurbish hidden features to bring them back to life as if they were brand new. Help users rediscover these valuable tools that have been neglected or overlooked.
  
• Get rid of redundant nodes, Houdini has to maintain the elegance of James Bond. eg: a shape node gathering all primitives (default prims, platonics, superformula, labs star, labs shapes...)
  
• Watertight Collision, like the hda from attila sipos. In fact, that's the output you would expect from the collision source node.
  
• Better particle fluid surface node, the result of the actual one is very poor. I always see people coming up with some workaround because the output of this node is not what they expect.
  
• More aliases, including presets for point and group expressions and other wrangle snippets. Also, list them somewhere pls, either in the docs or by pressing tab and typing "aliases".
  
• Straightforward Lattice node, the current one requires many nodes to make it work and is not that good after all.
  
• A basic Radial Array SOP with both the bend360 with auto capture length and 360/ncopies methods, including an interactive mode for easily placing the pivot center of the radial array leveraging the snapping options (plasticity).
  
• Slide SOP (to slide edges and points).
  
• Edge Flow SOP like the one from Tom Jerry
  
• Limit Bevel (plasticity)
  
• Extend Sheet Trim (Plasticity)
  
• Project Curve Curve (plasticity)
  
• Wrap Face and Unwrap Face SOPs (plasticity)
  
• Sketchup Extrude
  
• Geometry Layout SOP like the stone wall idea from iansmithartist
  
• Art-directable point velocity SOP like the BoomBox and Easy Debris hda from Jason Harmon
  
• Add an option in the boolean node to enable infinite slicing with the ability to choose whether or not to affect backfaces, eliminating the need to thicken the cutting shape beforehand. That way, we can replicate the imprint curve tool from plasticity by setting the operation to 'shatter'.
  
• Expand Match Size capabilities to unrotate and align to components like the 'align to component' shelf tool, right now feels like match size only does half of the job.
  
• Start passing the shelf tools to nodes, there are many attractive functionalities going unnoticed by being there. For example: I don't think most people know that after your grain simulations you have to use "upres sand" to invoke a combo of 4 nodes that does the rest of the work for you.
  
• Multiple outputs split node, so that we can split as many items as we need, instead of being limited to two.
  
• Support for sweeping multiple different cross sections in the sweep node.
  
• Bring Crowd Solver to SOP lvl.
  
• The crowds trigger node is just like the ones in game engines, thanks to its overridable functions they make all the heavy lifting for u. It's a shame that it is a crowds only thing. It would be useful for triggering events in other workflows as well.
  
• Help Feike to push out the APEX Flora tools to match or exceed the quality of Nils Westfelt's Simple Tree Tools and speed tree.
  
• Make a fine selection of the best nodes from third party libraries like Ql, AE, EZ, MOPs, Modeler and make your own take. People hate relying on addons, and that's one of Houdini's strengths, as it sets it apart from the competition, which handles this matter poorly.
  
• AI assisted keyframing + help for physics and secondary motion (cascadeur)
  
• UE5 queen and manny APEX rig ready to animate (cascadeur).
  
• Make attrs work directly in params without having to use the point/prim() functions, as they do in the primitive properties node for example, or like the context option editor in Solaris, where global variables can be declared and used in any parameter.
  
• VEX autocompletion like the versus code extension
  
• An UI option to provide some kind of visual feedback for parameters that differ from their default values. Also add the option to the cogwheel to show only params that have been tweaked. This would help navigate through others files or showcasing breakdowns and tuts.
  
• easy bindings, rmb/assign shortcut... for nodes, config options, ui buttons and window popups (plasticity)
  
• Fix redirections/dependencies script
  
• An option to stop nodes that are taking too long to cook in order to prevent hangs.
  
• Focus on elements when double-clicking them in the spreadsheet (unreal PCG).
  
• Support drag and drop in the spreadsheet to drag the attr names or values and drop them into any param field
  
• Better xform gizmos.
  
• A way to enter 3 values at once in the params (in MODO was ctrl+enter)
  
• Add a compute range button to all fit parameters (not all of them has it).
  
• Be able to set the render flag in mtlx and VOP nodes; which is more familiar, comfortable and elegant than debugging each node with a visualize node.
  
• Do you know when you have to set the resolution in a pyro/flip parameter and link it to every other resolution parameter? pls, save us from that redundancy somehow, so we can just set it once and pass it through.
  
• vellum recipes like the ones from MPM.
  
• Add inputs and outputs info to nodes documentation, and make sure to specify which of them are optional.
  
• GPT powered documentation, including Houdini Engine Doc in the same site.
  
• Houdini 21 Crash Course. A fast adoption guide to all the new features and workflow changes.
  
• Vertex Block Descent (VBD)
  
• Explore Neural VDBs, Neural Physics and Material Super-resolution.
  
• glTF 2.0 KHR_interactivity to make smart assets
  
• ML assisted sculpting.
  
• USD-HDAs.
  
• AI-powered nodes (Auto UV, Capture Biharmonic, quadremesh)... And more ML-COPs like "color grade from prompt", "color grade from reference", "tracking from target", "automatic subject masking", "image2material", "magnific", "color ramp from prompt", "image to svg", "super-resolution", "inpainting"...
  
• GPT wrangles for vex, python and USD with option for user feedback to fine tune the model.
  

LukeP
4) Quite annoying and haven’t figured this out yet, but say I have a sim… 10 nodes and display / render flag set on the last one. I just want to see parameters of say the 5th node… so I click the 5th node… what happens now is one of the most annoying things about houdini

(a) the viewport starts showing me overlay of the output of the selected node (the same pain point when modeling) what if I don’t want that? I just wanted to see the parameters ffs. Maybe even if I change them, I don’t want to see the geo of the node that I just clicked… I have the render / display flag set on the last node… In some cases I can press escape to disable that, but it’s still annoying

(b) and then of course the nemesis… I just wanted to see the parameters, but because of (a) above, the sim starts cooking.. then I’m left there trying to hammer on the Esc key with no result… maybe after 10s… this in my opinion, if addressed would be a huge list to UX

LukeP
- Continue to enhance Vulcan VP - should be faster than OpenGL, not slower? maybe evolve into RT renderer?

Siavash Tehrani

LukeP
4) Quite annoying and haven’t figured this out yet, but say I have a sim… 10 nodes and display / render flag set on the last one. I just want to see parameters of say the 5th node… so I click the 5th node… what happens now is one of the most annoying things about houdini

(a) the viewport starts showing me overlay of the output of the selected node (the same pain point when modeling) what if I don’t want that? I just wanted to see the parameters ffs. Maybe even if I change them, I don’t want to see the geo of the node that I just clicked… I have the render / display flag set on the last node… In some cases I can press escape to disable that, but it’s still annoying

(b) and then of course the nemesis… I just wanted to see the parameters, but because of (a) above, the sim starts cooking.. then I’m left there trying to hammer on the Esc key with no result… maybe after 10s… this in my opinion, if addressed would be a huge list to UX

Hi Luke, have you tried this option? You will need to restart your Houdini session. There are pros and cons to each setting, but for working with cook-heavy networks the "Show Display Operator" mode is nice.

LukeP
Не знал об этом!

RGaal

LukeP
Не знал об этом!

This setting is also in the viewport settings, and you can also assign a hotkey. But unfortunately this is not a switch, so you will have to assign two hotkeys - show current SOP and Show display SOP.

And yes, I would like a button on the viewport to enable the display flag mode when activating a node by clicking or PgUp/PgDn or other hotkeys. Clicking + "r" is the most annoying part in nodes.

viewer = hou.ui.paneTabOfType(hou.paneTabType.SceneViewer)
enable = not viewer.curViewport().settings().guideEnabled(hou.viewportGuide.CurrentGeometry)
for viewport in viewer.viewports():
    viewport.settings().enableGuide(hou.viewportGuide.CurrentGeometry, enable)
viewer.flashMessage("", "Current nodes are " + ("visible" if enable else "not visible"), 3)

Carlos_Rivadulla

• APEX Scene Modeling
  
• Custom COPs brushes support for Path SOP, with some sidefx presets to paint stitches, zippers, fabric and welding seams (SP).
  
• Simulation Brushes for sculpting
  
• UV Blend Shapes (like blender Animall addon)
  
• Geometry Library Rewrite
  
• Specific nodes to wrap and encourage the use of SDF modeling and kitbashing like the Dominik Lange and chakshuvfx plugin
  
• Component sensitive nodes.
  
• Interactive flag (maybe replacing the not so used frozen flag?). Why? (1) To know a node has an interactive mode and which ones do not. (2) To indicate that you are currently in the interactive mode of that node. (3) To avoid the need to lift your left hand to press Enter or Escape. (4) To feel in control of your process.
  
• Further expand the component builder workflow.
  
• XPU Solvers.
  
• Slide SOP (to slide edges and points).
  
• Edge Flow SOP like the one from Tom Jerry
  
• Limit Bevel (plasticity)
  
• Extend Sheet Trim (Plasticity)
  
• Project Curve Curve (plasticity)
  
• Wrap Face and Unwrap Face SOPs (plasticity)
  
• Sketchup Extrude
  
• Geometry Layout SOP like the stone wall idea from iansmithartist
  
• AI assisted keyframing + help for physics and secondary motion (cascadeur)
  
• Make attrs work directly in params without having to use the point/prim() functions, as they do in the primitive properties node for example, or like the context option editor in Solaris, where global variables can be declared and used in any parameter.
  
• An UI option to provide some kind of visual feedback for parameters that differ from their default values. Also add the option to the cogwheel to show only params that have been tweaked. This would help navigate through others files or showcasing breakdowns and tuts.
  
  - you can do that by going to search in parameter pane and drop down on show non default. You can also tie this to a shortcut. See my previous post on this.
  
  
• Support drag and drop in the spreadsheet to drag the attr names or values and drop them into any param field
  
• A way to enter 3 values at once in the params (in MODO was ctrl+enter)
  
  - I could swear this is doable. I did this before, don't remember how.
  
  
• Explore Neural VDBs, Neural Physics and Material Super-resolution.
  
• ML assisted sculpting.
  
• USD-HDAs.
  

alexeyvanzhula1984

RGaal

LukeP
Не знал об этом!

This setting is also in the viewport settings, and you can also assign a hotkey. But unfortunately this is not a switch, so you will have to assign two hotkeys - show current SOP and Show display SOP.

And yes, I would like a button on the viewport to enable the display flag mode when activating a node by clicking or PgUp/PgDn or other hotkeys. Clicking + "r" is the most annoying part in nodes.

This shelf tool toggles the visibility of the current nodes on and off

viewer = hou.ui.paneTabOfType(hou.paneTabType.SceneViewer)
enable = not viewer.curViewport().settings().guideEnabled(hou.viewportGuide.CurrentGeometry)
for viewport in viewer.viewports():
    viewport.settings().enableGuide(hou.viewportGuide.CurrentGeometry, enable)
viewer.flashMessage("", "Current nodes are " + ("visible" if enable else "not visible"), 3)

LukeP
Is there a similar script that would allow ‘r’ and click on the node to not only set the display flag but also select it, to eliminate the second click?

editor = kwargs["pane"]
if type(editor) == hou.NetworkEditor:
    cursor_pos = editor.posToScreen(editor.cursorPosition())
    cursor_pos_data = editor.networkItemsInBox(cursor_pos, cursor_pos, for_select=True)
    if cursor_pos_data:
        cursor_node = cursor_pos_data[0][0]
        
        # SET NODE AS CURRENT
        editor.setCurrentNode(cursor_node)
        
        # ENABLE DISPLAY FLAG IF THE NODE HAS IT
        if hasattr(cursor_node, "setDisplayFlag"):
            cursor_node.setDisplayFlag(True)

        # ENABLE RENDER FLAG IF THE NODE HAS IT
        if hasattr(cursor_node, "setRenderFlag"):
            cursor_node.setRenderFlag(True)

Carlos_Rivadulla
Procedural NURBS Modeling. Once someone in the world develops such a thing, even AI will have a hard time surpassing it. Furthermore, parametric modeling is less destructive than polygonal, minimizes manual tweaking which is closer to Houdini's idea. A workflow example would be: convert to nurbs > bevel > convert back to poly, this way u would steal the most envied feature of Plasticity (which is the NURBS beveling). Another killer feature to start with would be nurbs lofting and bridge edges for surface modeling.

alexeyvanzhula1984