USD Primitive patterns using auto-collections can now introduce a time dependency if the auto-collection evaluation may depend on stage data that is time varying. This time dependency is displayed in the prim pattern and selection rule editor dialogs. The bound, fartherthan, and closer than auto-collections also gained a time range optional argument to eliminate this time dependency and allow a primitive's bounding box to be evaluated over a time range with a single pattern (if the time samples are all simultaneously available on the stage).

Added Edit Prototypes node. This node allows users to edit instances in-place, without adding unnecessary implicit or explicit prototypes to the stage. The editable subnet provides a masked-off scene where the instance prototypes can be edited in an isolated scene graph.

Renamed Edit Prototype to Assign Prototypes. This was done to help discoverability, since this node changes which prototypes are assigned to different instances. It also frees up the name to be used with a new node.

The source work item input on the Attribute Copy TOP can now be unconnected or have no work items. The node will just pass through the destination work items as-is.

Fixed an issue where attribute names would be populated when there were zero attributes to populate. This would manifest in a hang if your HDA generated zero geometric parts.

Fixed a bug where custom attributes assigned to materials in a given FBX file were not being correctly imported when the Material Type property was set to FBX Shader Nodes or VOP Networks.

Prevent setting or removing data block (hou.Node.setDataBlock) on nodes that are inside locked subnets. Attempting to do this now raises a PermissionError exception.

Add support for custom frame rates in the FBX scene exporter. For the KineFX FBX exporter, it also now supports more default frame rates without outputting as a custom frame rate value in the exported file.

Added view state parameter option in TopoTransfer to preserve display of shading attribtues on the input geometry.

Added an option to the Rewire Vertices SOP to delete the target points attribute after it is used.

The hou.Parm.setFromParm() method now supports ramp parameters.

Added strsplit and strsplitcount expression functions to tokenize a string using a set of separator characters, and return a specific token or the number of tokens.

Bumped up Houdini's Alembic library to version 1.8.3.

XPU: fixed a bug with light-linking (bug: 118796)

Added a HAPI_Shutdown method which should be called before exiting by programs that use an in-process session.

Fixed a bug where material path may be non-deterministic when using the built-in "Material Name" Cryptomatte layer if there's an instancer with multiple prototypes that share the same material.

XPU: the minimum compute capability across all GPUs in a system is used for shader compilation. This fixes an issue when GPUs had different compute capabilities, as well as reducing the number of shader compilations needed.

Adding the Reference::2.0 LOP, which provides all the functionality of the old Reference LOP, plus allows many files or inputs to be referenced each onto a uniquely named primitive in the scene.

Added a new mode ot the Sublayer LOP which sublayers files and the connections to the multi-input (rather than only allowig one or the other). Added an Enable toggle for controlling whether the multi-input connections actually get added when in this mode.

Fixed potential memory leaks in a proxy object API.

Fixed the bahevior of the "Set all parameters to do nothing" operation on the Camera LOP. Previsouyl it would put the aperture parameters into a bad state.

The File Compress TOP now exposes parameters to control the compression level used when creating a .tar.gz archive. For .zip archives compression can be toggled on or off.

Fixed a bug where the SOP Create LOP wasn't assigning materials properly for imported volumes.

The File Rename TOP now supports renaming upstream output files, instead of always requiring a custom file path.