If you have a shadow, nobody can hurt you! The Viewport

The viewport was not very attractive when I started using Houdini: it was very technical and analytical, but not photorealistic in most cases.

The behavior of the Principled Shaders (Universal shader à la Disney) in the viewport is now comparable to Substance or Marmoset Toolbag. Now you can work with a PBR-workflow and get predictable results when rendering or displaying the textures in other software solutions.

If you want to create tools that require interactive manipulation in the viewport you will like the object level python support and the browser/inspector panel for python states. SideFX is obviously building the foundation for a more interactive Houdini. The functions I just mentioned are primarily made for the software developers and not for artists, as they are very advanced and require deep Python and Houdini knowledge. But this is typical Houdini and the tools are available for everybody, just ignore them if it is too much for you. SideFX used them to implement the new interactive constraint setup viewport manipulators and they are very cool and welcome if you need to set up an RDB destruction.

Terrain Erosion

There is not much to say here except that SideFX tackled exactly the pain points. Erosion requires 70% less disk space. I tested that, and yes, that’s the way it is.

However, I think World Machine and the new Gaea have even faster and/or better, more beautiful erosion solutions. But that does not matter. Why should I care? TOPs are here! Just read on and you will understand.

Game Dev Toolset

Alice Vision , an open-source photogrammetry tool, was connected to Houdini.

A dedicated hard surface shader will display game assets in Houdini’s Viewport close to their look in a game engine.

Other additions are:

blended linear and dual quaternion Skinning for FBX I / O

MikkT Support in PolyFrame SOP

a UV Attribute Transfer SOP

a Path Deformer

a building and spiral Generator

and many other improvements in existing tools.

Four Times the Speed of Light! (Mantra)

Unfortunately, not much happened here, we’ll probably have to wait for H18 for bigger advances in rendering. However, photon maps are now generated four times faster.

And Light Path Expressions can now save light without shadow. Really! Light without shadows! Wow!

TOP of the OPs

As I said, TOPs (short for Task Operator Network) are the highlight of this update. Procedural Dependency Graph technology (PDG) is the new technology behind TOPs. SideFX will also be offering Pilot PDG as stand-alone software, that is an indication of what we are dealing with here.