Texture paths in VEX shader code are auto-promoted as shader parameters, and authored as USD shader input attributes, which allows output processors to alter them according to user's configuration (eg, make them relative).

Fix geometry spreadsheet tooltips so that they show the correct cell value when is is being sorted by some column.

Fixed issues where the crowd solver did not behave correctly when multiple crowd object DOPs were being solved at once.

Added a new 'Use This Object's Data' option to the Geometry VOP, POP VOP, and Gas Field VOP when binding one of the inputs to DOP data. This allows easily binding to other subdata of the current object being solved, when the solver is applied to multiple DOP objects (using $OBJID in the DOP path expression requires enabling the Solver per Object toggle, which is problematic for mutual affectors).

The "Attributes Filtered" widget in the TOPs work item inspection window is now visible when No Copy attributes have been implicitly filtered by the "Show No Copy Attributes" button.

Bumped up the OpenImageIO library version to 2.2.13.

Bumped up the OpenColorIO library version to 2.0.0 as per the VFX Reference Platform CY2021 specification.

Houdini is now built against the C++17 API as per the VFX Reference Platform CY2021 specification.

Fixed bug that would cause LOP tools to place new nodes before the node with the display flag rather than after when working in /stage.

Fixed a bug in HAPI that could cause HAPI_GetAssetDefinitionParmValues to erroneously throw an exception.

Houdini will no longer crash when a node has ".usdz" as the last five characters of its name.

Added path attribute mode to prototype indexing for the instancer LOP. This allows you to store the primitive path for the desired prototype as a string attribute on the points.

Fixed an issue with merging / unpacking geometry containing edge groups that in certain cases (such as packed fragments containing edge groups) could cause the edge group's contents to be incorrect along with slow performance.

Fix an issue where Houdini could use a full CPU core forever when opening a file in Manual Update mode into the Solaris desktop.

Fixed a bug in the Edit SOP that prevented the soft falloff visualizer from keeping up with changes to the soft radius.

Fixed a bug where setting the language of string parm to OpenCL didn't work properly in the parameter editor.

Fixed a bug where the expression dialog didn't automatically get the key focus. Hitting Alt E twice in the wrangle snippet now opens the external editor.

Fixed a bug which would cause some operations to fail after a Cache LOP, such as changing the target of a relationship.

Fixed some issues with outline selection display:

• Point Instances in LOPs properly outline now
• The color more closely matches the intended selection color,most noticable in objects.
• The normal-DPI outline is no longer very dim.

Fixed the PieceAttribute example and updated the Squidremesh example.

Fixed an issue where value change event for radio folders/tabs wasn't triggered by left/right arrow buttons.

SOP GLTF node: fixed broken scene, node, and mesh chooser dialogs caused by spaces in any of the entity names.

It is now possible to specify a prefix before the @ operator in expressions, to force the operator to use data from a particular source. Valid prefixes are G for geometry, C for context options and P for PDG work item attribs. For example, P@size will always resolve to the "size" work item attribute even if there is an available context option or geometry attribute with the same name. This can be useful when using a mix of context options and PDG attributes in the same network.

The LOP Viewer pane now has a button to "freeze" the USD stage in the viewport. Changes to the LOP network will update the scene graph tree and scene graph details, but the viewport scene will be unchanged until the viewport is unfrozen (though you can still tumble the view). Pressing this button can also optionally pause the renderer.

Fixed an issue with TOP dependencies lines not drawing properly when viewing a TOP network with nested subnets.