Pressing and holding S (Select tool) now switches to Select while you hold the key down, and goes back to the previous tool when you release the key. Tapping S will still switch you to the Select tool.

Added a preference for the "close enough" distance (in pixels) when pointing at handles. Choose Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Handles.

Ladder controls on handles are now semi-transparent to make it easier to see the effect of changes.

Dedicated game development tools shelf (ongoing).

Metallic map support at normal quality level.

"Cutout" transparency quality setting hides anything with Alpha equal to 0, and shows everything else fully opaque. This is much faster because it doesn’t require blending or extra display passes.

Basic support for displaying OpenSubdiv 3.x surfaces.

New option in display options sets an upper limit on the number of polygons produced by viewport subdivision (default is 10 million). If the viewport goes over the limit, it will iteratively restart at a lower subdivision level until it is under budget (this may result in no viewport subdivision at all).

The 3D view now supports instancing on points with an instancefile attribute (when the object has instancing turned on). Previously this only worked at render time.

Productivity and performance improvements. You can now input skin objects to Guide Groom and Guide Deform to set up source relationships. The Animate and Simulate now support selecting multiple objects.

Hair system is more efficient and time-independent.

You can now groom animated and/or simulated guide hairs.

Additional methods for interpolating between guide hairs.

More flexible masking, for example by curve length or skin curvature.

You can now paint on attributes to override simulation settings.

The Guide Process SOP has many more options for controlling bending.

The Hair Generate object now has an option to generate hair once in the rest position and deforming afterwards, using the updated Guide Deform.

Enhanced Topo Build interactive mode allows sliding edges, skinning polygonal "sleeves" around roughly cylindrical features such as a tail, and more accurate snapping. Topobuild can also now collapse edges and faces.

Soft selection can now work by surface distance.

More geometry nodes are now compile-able.

The Invoke SOP lets you "apply" a compiled SOP block to an arbitrary input. This can be used to reduce duplication in a network, or to allow an asset to accept a reference to a block as a parameter and use the block to modify how the asset works.

You can now set the HOUDINI_SOP_DISABLE_COMPILENODE environment variable to make compiled blocks run in non-compiled mode. This may be useful for testing.

Fast alignment of handles and construction plane.

Move Center to Pivot shelf tool that translates an object’s geometry to its local object origin. For consistency, the "Center Pivot" tool is now called Move Pivot to Center.

Improvements to Alembic IO. Ogawa files now load in parallel. Animated Alembics can play back much faster. Caching allows multiple SOPs to reference the same Alembic with less cost.

A display option in the 3D viewer lets you color 3D boundaries (unshared edges) or UV boundaries differently to make them easier to see (pop-up menu on the Markers tab under "Draw"). A new option "UV boundaries in UV only" lets you color UV boundaries only in a UV viewport (not in 3D).

Objects and geometry nodes now have a separate Pivot Rotate parameter to rotate the geometry’s local axes. Previously, it was only possible to translate the local axes. Rotating the local frame of reference can make it easier to animate along non-axis-aligned directions.

The interactive pivot handle now allows rotation as well as translation. (Press Ins or ' to switch to the pivot handle.)

Many improvements to Alembic loading and saving.

New parameter on Repack SOP lets you convert packed fragments to regular packed primitives.

The grouping syntax now accepts .r/.g/.b and .u/.v in addition to .x/.y/.z for attribute component comparison. For example @Cd.r>0.1.

The Assemble SOP now has controls to transfer groups as well as attributes.

The Sequence Blend has been redesigned, is compile-able, and supports smooth attribute interpolation.

The Tube SOP now has an option to generate the minimal axis-aligned cylinder that contains all the points in the input geometry.

In the Add SOP, adding polygons "by attribute" is now faster.

Heightfield Blur can now blend the edges when the blur is masked. This fixes any big discontinuities along the mask edges that might be created if the mask is not feathered.

Edge detection added to Volume Analysis SOP. This currently supports both Sobel and Prewitt edge detection.

Better UV generation on Poly Extrude and Poly Bridge nodes. You can now automatically generate linear texture maps for bridges and extruded side polygons for every existing texture attribute, with control over island scale and shape.

You can now select points when displaying vertex UVs in the UV viewport.

The UV viewport only shows the current/selected object when you are at the object level.

UV Layout node now has very fast optimal packing with support for packing inside holes and rotational fitting.

The file browser’s Show sequences as one entry option now works with UDIM and UVTile filenames.

The color visualizer can now visualize "texture distortion" directly. This visualizer is now available in the UV viewport’s UV menu.

Previously the visualizer relied on the UV Flatten SOP generating a distort attribute. That attribute is no longer generated.

More refinement of new material workflow introduced in Houdini 16.

Dramatically reduced indirect specular noise.

Much faster rendering of nested procedurals and packed primitives.

Improved sampling of PBR lights.

Improved flipbooking.

• Flipbook all viewports in the view as a single image.

• Filter what object types appears in the flipbook.

• Flipbook to MPlay and disk at the same time.

• The frame range setting now has a menu with common presets.

• Option to leave the playhead at the last frame when done flipbooking (to make it easier to concatenate different sequences into one flipbook).

The Classic shader now has an option to use packed primitive alpha (Alpha attribute). Previously it always used point alpha, and this is still the default.

Faster texture baking.

Simplified the LUT/gamma/ICIO interface in the color correction toolbar.

New -t option to render a specific tile in mantra makes it easy to distribute rendering of a single frame.

PBR subsurface scattering is now evaluated during direct lighting. It no longer relies on indirect bounces.

Updated to OpenSubdiv 3.1.

The Cusp Angle for Vertex Normals detail property can now control the cusp angle for automatic vertex normals in geometry in Mantra. Previously this only worked in the 3D view.

You can now set agents to partially rag-doll on the Crowd State node. You can set a named set of joints to rag-doll, and/or you can specify that joints try to follow their animation clip but also react to RBD collisions.

New stiffness settings on Crowd State node prevent loosely swinging limbs on ragdolls.

Agent FBX Import now creates extra channels in the animation clip for user-defined properties.

The Agent Clip Transition Graph SOP has new options to automatically compute transition points between clips, making it much less work to set up smooth transitions between clips.

You can now use Agent Edit SOP interactively in the 3D view. Agent Edit can now adjust transforms in the agent’s local space instead of world space. You can now adjust a joint’s scale transform. Agent Edit can now use VEXpressions to vary the transform parameters for each agent.

There is now an option on the Agent Layer SOP to filter which shape bindings to copy.

The Agent CHOP can now create a clip from an agent’s transforms.

Agent Terrain Adaptation SOP now has an option to disable adaptations that use an underling DOP simulation (such as foot locking and leaning). When this option is off, the node switches to a stateless implementation that allows fast preview and scrubbing.

Objects now have a separate Pivot Rotate parameter to rotate the geometry’s local axes, for better animation control. Press Ins or ' to switch to the pivot handle.

Enhanced X-ray display and better selection of X-ray objects.

Big improvements to the beta muscle and flesh system.

• Comprehensive non-simulated and simulated workflows.

• Advanced Muscle asset.

• Muscles can be imported as deforming geometry or simulated with flesh system.

• Density-based FEM constraint regions.

• Anisotropic FEM fibre contraction.

Improvements to Pose Library interface, including baking.

Refinements to the CHOP-based animation constraint system introduced in Houdini 16.

Pose tool promoted to toolbox on left side of viewer pane.

Improved Align Capture Pose tool.

You can now choose whether FBX export creates an extra root for the Export node’s subnetwork.

Smarter multi-wiring. During a wiring operation, you can Shift-click other inputs/outputs to add them to the operation. If you are wiring multiple inputs and Alt-click in space Houdini will create a dot. If you are wiring multiple outputs and Alt-click in space, Houdini will create a Merge node and continue wiring the merged output.

Hold ⌃ Ctrl when minimizing/restoring a network box to move other nodes around the netbox to account for its new size.

When a node inside a minimized netbox is selected, the netbox is highlighted and the name of the node is drawn next to it.

Many improvements to the Find dialog. Improved performance. Pin the dialog to have multiple Find dialogs open. Optional recursive search of child nodes. You can now search by the raw textual contents of parameters (for example, you can search for uses of specific variables or expression functions).

Nodes with required inputs now have a red triangle drawn above the input as a visual hint.

You can now hold S to enter a "select-only" mode. While you hold the key down, clicking and dragging will only select. This makes it easy to select nodes without worrying about moving the node or accidentally clicking wires, flags, or other UI.

You can now ⌃ Ctrl + ⇧ Shift + click nodes to toggle selected/unselected, as you can with items in the 3D view.

The network editor toolbar now has a button to show or hide the node palette.

Faster display of representative parameter text badges.

You can now set a custom descriptive parameter on a node using HOM.

The labels in the top left and right corners of the network editor are now generated by a replaceable script (PATH/python2.7libs/nodegraphtitle.py)

The network editor will now look for PATH/python2.7libs/nodegraphhooks.py and import it. This provides a standard place for expert users to hook into network editor events. See extending the network editor for more information.

Tabs that contain off-default parameters are now bolded.

Tabs and multi-parms now have Disable when and Hide when options in the type properties editor, allowing an asset author to hide or disable them based on other parameter values.

The parameter editor’s gear menu is now in the customizable XML format ($HFS/ParmGearMenu.xml).

You can now attach constraint network geometry as subdata instead of as a relationship.

Added a Solver Tolerance parameter to the Bullet solver to let the solver stop early if it is "close enough". The Bullet solver now always outputs force, torque, distance, and angle attributes.

The FEM solver now generates attributes containing information about forces and collisions.

The Solid and Hybrid objects now display statistics about the computed material properties and distributed soft constraint coefficients. This can be useful when using multiplier attributes.

Added new options for the Cone Twist constraint’s guide geometry.

The Constraint Network DOP now has an option to use geometry from the parent DOP network’s inputs.

Fast compilation of Unified Noise.

Houdini now loads VEX plugins from directories in the new $HOUDINI_VEX_DSO_PATH environment variable, if it exists. You no longer need to list VEX plugins in a separate index file.