User Guide > Whats New

More Houdini 6.5 Features


Interface

  • Pane linking behaviour is now different.
  • New menu toggle option in some handles to always align them to world axes.
  • Channel aliasing and parm label aliasing of dynamic parms
  • Ability to select the boundary of an existing selection. B hotkey.
  • Ability to customize the contents of the "Jump" menu in the File Chooser.
  • File ops now remember the last 5 files loaded.
  • The Find Node dialog allows you to select all the nodes that match a search
  • Many mplay enhancements (audio support, sequencing, blocking)
  • File browser can now sort by type and modification time.
  • Added new menu command "File|Run Script..." which allows the user to run a script.
  • New global object option to "Keep Position When Moving"
  • Parameters that are changing due to a handle (or XCF) are highlighted.
  • Added option to disable clicking on the wire connections.
  • The group display buttons (for OBJ tiles) show the number of objects in that group that are visible.
  • Object subnets and custom object subnets allow you to specify the visible children.
  • Custom color palettes can be added to the color palette menu.

Digital Assets
  • Parms in Type Properties Dialog are now shown in a tree-view fashion.
  • OTLs can now save their contents in a compressed format.
  • A new safeguard option found in the Operator Type Manager Definition tab which allows Digital Asset creators to hide the Allow Editing of Contents/Match Current Definition menu item.

Animation
  • The path handle has been hooked up to tools other than geo/pose (eg. blend).
  • Many enhancements to the graph editor such as:
    - Shift-N hides channel names
    - Channel groups support nesting
    - Treeview for channel groups
    - Copying keys copies slope as well (not just key value)
  • Flipbook allows choosing which objects are visible (through a new option in the viewwrite command).
  • Improved openGL flipbooking
  • Pretransform CHOP now has input and output pivot parameters which are used in the interpretation and generation of results.
  • Object CHOP can now compute the full transform matrix between two objects
  • Can specify custom RMB menu items in the popup menu for channel groups.

Modeling
  • Attribute Mirror SOP allows mirroring of several attributes at once.
  • New AttribStringEdit SOP
  • Two new SOPs: Color SOP, UVQuickShade SOP (they are implemented as Digital Assets)
  • Extended Info dialog for SOPs

Characters
  • New CaptureMerge SOP
  • CaptureMirror has an Average Weight option.
  • New commands "bonealigncapture"
  • New SOP: CaptureOverride
  • New system for capturing geometry by capture regions.

Lighting
  • The shading quality parm in light and cam objects is now accessible in the UI.
  • Light handle won't show the look-at for point lights.

Rendering
  • OpenGL Render ROP can now render Polygon-As-Subdiv

Compositing
  • Changes to workflow in the Rotospline COP.
  • New COPs: Unpin, Border
  • Expand COP can now handle per-pixel variable expansion and vertical/ horizontal expand/dropoff sizes can be different.
  • Added a new VEX COP context global variable PXSC (proxy pixel scale)

Other
  • New options to the helpbrowser command
  • New chrefit command fits channel data to cubic curve and assigns new keys. criteria, could make it easy to change the parms on all nodes of a certain type and so forth.
  • New mechanism for limiting the maximum number of backup files created (HOUDINI_MAX_BACKUP_FILES).
  • New mechanism for customizing the name of the backup files created (HOUDINI_AUTOSAVE_FILENAME).
  • Most Recently Used histories are kept with load file fields.
  • New otprefer command.
  • New chsop expression function similar to chs but is intended for fetching node names.
  • Added panepath command
  • Hscript and textport and script files support '\' at the end of the line to continue the line.
  • chcommit command has several new options.
  • Added commands chblockbegin and chblockend which can be put around blocks of chadd, chkey commands to speed up execution of scripts.
  • New expression commands: hasvertexattrib, haspointattrib, hasprimattrib and hasdetailattrib.
  • New oplayout algorithm
  • New chopexportmap command.
  • Houdini error messages can now be logged to a file (HOUDINI_ERRORLOG_FILENAME). This is useful for getting the errors from operators that are added in a script.
  • acombine application allows addition of multiple sounds to a single sound file.