Houdini 18.5 What’s new What’s new in Houdini 18

What’s new RBD Destruction

Houdini 18 features exciting improvements to destruction workflows such as guided destruction, improved chipping, destruction in SOPs, and custom fracturing.

Artist-friendly guided-destruction workflow.
More realistic chipping for concrete and glass.
Support for easy fracturing with custom meshes.
Procedural constraint conversion.
Entire destruction pipeline available in SOPs. See the Simple Fracture and Simple Guided RBDs shelf tools.
Soft-constraint plasticity attributes.
New RBD Bullet Solver SOP for RBD simulations inside a geometry network. This also makes bullet simulations available to Houdini Core users.
Automated tracking, tagging, and deletion of separated faces.
Enhanced visualization via the RBD Exploded View SOP.
Improved detail fracturing reliability and cohesion with proxies.
Many enhancements to RBD data unpacking.

What’s new in Houdini 18

Solaris

Solaris is Houdini’s support for creating and editing USD. This includes a new network type (LOPs), tools for layout and lighting, an improved scene viewer that displays the scene using Hydra delegates, and a new renderer (Karma) that natively renders USD files.

RBD Destruction

Houdini 18 features exciting improvements to destruction workflows such as guided destruction, improved chipping, destruction in SOPs, and custom fracturing.

Modeling and Geometry

Houdini 18 adds numerous new and improved tools for interactive and procedural modeling.

PDG and TOPs

In Houdini 18 PDG has even better wedging, better Deadline and Tractor integration, a new toolbar UI to get an overall sense of the network state, and numerous improvements to tools and internals.

Viewport and user interface

Houdini 18 includes improvements to the viewport and user interface such as a new Paint tool, 2D pan and zoom of 3D cameras, hotkeys in radial menus, and much improved custom Python states.

Pyro and FLIP fluids

Houdini 18 features a new more efficient "sparse volume" implementation of pyro, pyro in SOPs, and faster FLIP fluids.

Vellum

In Houdini 18 vellum improves resolution and scale independence, more robustness, sliding surface constraints, and other constraint improvements.

Character and crowds

Houdini 18 adds blendshapes on agents, export from crowds to USD skeletons, procedural clip transitions, better FBX support, and more.

FEM

Houdini adds new solver models with improved realism and performance.

VEX and expressions