Mplay enhancements

• Image comparision is now re-implemented.
• Audio support added.
• Images and sequences can now be loaded during a session.

When selecting the inputs for a sop, you can now undo the changes to the selections. Once you're finished selecting, though, you cannot undo each change made to the selection. You can only undo creating the operator.

Construction plane handle now has a right-mouse menu that can do most of the things you can do in the right-mouse menu of the c-plane state. It will also now only be drawn in perspective viewports.

cuadd command no longer allows addition of non-panel gadgets at the root level. This behaviour was incredibly bad.

The construction plane handle can now be rotated around its normal and translated along its normal. The corners are no longer restricted to be pulled diagonally, they can move freely on the plane.

Took the first step in fixing state memories. They show up now, however there are still some problems with them.

Fixed a bug in the construction plane state where going into the state for the first time would cause the c-plane to suddenly change size.

Added an option to vmantra output driver to output camera transform separately instead of combining it with object transform.

Added new construction plane handle. Still very much a work-in-progress.

Fixed two bugs in PolyKnit. The first one had to do with knitting connected geometry, where we would sometimes not pick up a meta edges on quad because some method was making an assumption about information it didn't have. The other was a display bug when reading back from the SOP parameters when you had flipped a meta quad to a meta edge.

The brush SOPs (comb, paint, sculpt) all now have an "Orient to Surface" toggle in the stroke tab. This will switch from using the surface normal for the brush direction and the view direction. View direction is preferable for bumpy surfaces.

There is a new SOP, the Layer SOP, which is designed to work with multipass textures. By changing your current layer, you change which attributes color, texture, etc, map to. On layer 5, for example, color is "Cd5" and texture coordiantes are "uv5". You see in the viewport what your current layer's values are - unless you have multipass texturing turned on in the display options. Then you get the effect of drawing each layer in order from the first to the max layers specified in this SOP. Each layer is drawn on top of one another with the Blend mode by default. However, you can override the blend control with any standard OpenGL modes using the SOP.

vmantra output driver can now output null surface shaders instead of the real ones during shadow map generation stage. This behaviour is controlled by the "Null Surface" option.

Some spreadsheets now let the user resize individual columns. The geo edit spreadsheet and Jive table allow resizing of any column. The oplist allows resizing of some columns, as do various other spreadsheet controls.

The group section and the PI section of the PI pane can now be closed independently using hotkeys of the CTRL+RMB menu.

Improved mplay in many ways:

• The frame range of images in now what you would expect whentyping the files on the command line, rather than the wholeframe range.
• Gamma has been added to the color controls. As well, gamma maybe adjusted when saving files.
• Images and full sequences can be saved out from mplay.
• The Houdini image search path is used when loading files.

The Brush SOP has been replaced by the Paint, Sculpt and Comb SOPs, which provide specific behaviour without the kitchen sink of options. The Sculpt SOP has the modelling operations - deform (which now works with arbitrary axes), smooth, and the combination smooth deform. The Paint SOP can also work with arbitrary attributes, and generate new attributes if desired.

The variable to control threading in the IMG library was changed from SESI_THREAD_NOIMG to HOUDINI_THREAD_IMAGE. The sense of the variable was also changed so that threading is turned off by default. This doesn't affect COP2, but will affect the old composite operators and most noticably, ipaint.

When objects of the same name were in different sub-networks, the renderer got confused as to which object was being referred to. For objects in sub-networks, the name passed to the renderer now includes the full path without the leading "/obj/". When dealing with objects in subnetworks, this is the name which should be used when specifying visible objects. For example: *,^s_windmill1/* will match all objects except for the objects contained in s_windmill1. Note that the pattern: s_windmill1 will not cause the objects in the subnet to be rendered, the asterix must be specified in the pattern.

Fixed a problem with wren that produced small breaks in lines.

The Capture page under the Bone object's parameters dialog now only shows the parameters that are relevant to the bone's capture type. They change when you change the capture type.

The Capture region handle now has an option for showing it as opaque. This provides a quick way to determine if points are within a capture region without using a Capture SOP.

Changing an operator name now causes any manipulators which are attached to that operator to potentially change their name as well. The manipulator searches for the old op name, and replaces it with the new one.

Fixed a bug in wren that caused it to skip drawing some wires, especially near the bottom of the image.

It's now possible to interactively edit the dialog script of any scripted OP. These include the scripted sub-networks, or any VEX OP. Click on the OP tile and choose "Edit dialog script".