SideFX Houdini 16 features:

User Experience – New Node Network and Radial Menus

For a fast and fluid experience, the new network editor has been redesigned from scratch to include custom node shapes, alignment and layout tools, ‘dot’ nodes and much more. New context-sensitive and fully customizable radial menus provide quick access to common tools, making Houdini more accessible for artists.

– Brand new architecture for better performance, user experience, and control

– Completely redesigned look and feel
– ‘Dot’ connections to help route wires
– Customizable node shapes
– Resizeable color palette
– ‘Flyout ring’ to quickly access node flags and node info at any zoom level
– Persistent node info dialog with live links and cut-and-paste capabilities
– Visual ‘badges’ to indicate certain properties of the node
– Multi-selectable and multi-assignable wires
– Ability to knife-cut wire connections
– Snapping guides for fast and easy node alignment
– Automatic shifting of nodes to accommodate new entrants
– Intuitive, gesture-driven network layout tools
– Quickmark hotkeys to jump between networks or within one network
– Dimming of long wires to prevent obstruction of nodes
– Visual indication of non-local dependencies, with handy jump-to controls
– Background image support for network boxes or the entire canvas
– Font size, color and background controls for sticky notes
– Optional display of the node type
– Powerful search engine

Modeling – Artist-Friendly Tools and Procedural Techniques

The modeling toolset in Houdini continues to grow – with new Boolean tools, Smooth and PolyFill. These tools make it easier to create a good surface topology for use in Film, TV, Games and VR, and can be used interactively in the viewport or procedurally in the network editor.

Fast Boolean with exact predicates and arithmetic

– 3D and UV smoothing with advanced surface analysis kernels
– PolyFill with quads, fans, and more
– Enhanced PolySplit and PolyBevel
– Redesigned Copy/Instance and Group
– Intersection analysis and stitching
– Robust 2D triangulation
– Selection enhancements
– Fast tool access via customizable, gestural radial menus
– Infinite reference plane with rulers
– Medial axis snapping
– Vertex normal support in the viewport for cussing
– Pseudo-bevelling with Normal SOP
– Aggressive geometry compression
– Extensive OpenCL support
– ‘Compiled SOP’ architecture: parallel cooking and memory savings
– 3D Mouse support

Terrain Generation – Full Artistic Control using Volume Slices and Height Fields

SideFX Houdini 16 terrain system lets you layer and edit terrain easily with tools such as procedural noise, or paint or mask out areas directly. The operations are very similar to image compositing, so terrain artists will find the Houdini workflow familiar. The terrain can then collide with Fluid simulations, Crowd agents, Particles, RBD/destruction and Pyro FX – without converting the heightfields into geometry.

– Brand new architecture for procedural terrain generation
– Based on height-field volumes in SOPs
– Full and immediate access to Houdini’s modeling arsenal
– 30+ dedicated surface operators
– Powerful erosion models
– Straightforward workflow, similar to image compositing but in 3D
– Seamless optional leveraging of Houdini’s compositing network (COPs)
– Ability to mask areas of interest with freeform curves and texture maps
– Ability to paint and override any attribute
– Support for GeoTIFF and several Lidar formats
– Native output to game engines
– Fully tileable
– Game-friendly terrain material and specialized shader for VFX use
– High-quality visualization in the viewport
– Dedicated Mantra procedural for rendering
– Very fast: hardware accelerated via OpenCL
– Native collision support for Houdini’s physical sim environment (DOPs)
Look Development – Streamlined Shader Building Workflow

SideFX Houdini 16 includes a new shader building workflow that allows for layer mixing and quick access to procedural texturing tools. Mantra has been enhanced with improved BSDFs for creating Sub-Surface Scattering, Dielectrics, Absorption and more. Game artists can leverage an improved texture baking workflow.

Architecture for single-tiered shader creation in VOPs (no SHOPs required)
– Much streamlined workflow to aid both new and existing users
– Full support for nested, unlimited shader layering
– SideFX Houdini 16 brings redesigned VOP node tiles
– Ray-traced SSS BSDF with image-plane outputs
– SideFX Houdini 16 brings support for unified nested dielectrics
– Dispersion and absorption BSDFs
– Redesigned Principled uber shader with extensive features and controls
– Updated shader gallery with new entries such as skin, wax, and mountain
– Easy OpenGL tagging of shader attributes for viewport visualization
– Viewport support for metallics, coat, occlusion, reflection and more
– Texture baking enhancements
– OpenColor IO support
– Per-pixel inspection of material stylesheet overrides in IPR
– Significant performance enhancements to Mantra
– Fine-grained, intuitive controls for the quality/performance tradeoff
– Direct rendering of HIP files containing curves and points with no Engine license
Character Animation & Rigging – Advanced Rigging Tools with Muscles

SideFX Houdini 16 new animation and rigging tools have been improving over the last few releases – and with the Auto-rigging, Muscle and Flesh architecture and Invisible rigs in Houdini 16, a complete character workflow is now in place. The new Biharmonic skin capturing will save riggers valuable time while the FEM-based muscles produce high-realism results.

Many enhancements to the Animation Editor

– Flexible constraint architecture based on VOPs and CHOPs
– Biped and quadruped auto-rigs
– Biharmonic skin capturing to diminish the need for weight painting
– Fast bone placement with medial axis support
– ‘Invisible rig’ support in Pose tool
– Spring-based and FEM-based skin & muscle system
– Significantly improved FEM soft body solver
– Optimized for performance
Hair & Grooming – Designed for Unlimited Control

Home Page - https://www.sidefx.com/community/sidefx-releases-houdini-16/