What’s new Viewport, user interface, and scripting

On this page

OpenGL viewer ¶

Display of uniform fog, volumetric fog.
You can now resize viewports within viewers by dragging the dividers between them. You can even resize multiple viewports at once by dragging an intersection.
10× faster high-quality lighting of large scenes with many lights.
Default zoom on background image.
Improved support for OpenColorIO (OCIO).
The OpenGL render node now uses 64-bit precision. This prevents vertex warping on geometry very far from the origin.
More accurate color correction.
DDS 8-bit image importing.
OCIO view synchronization with MPlay.
Improved MPlay display of two-channel images.
MPlay now sets images to the OpenColorIO Scene-Linear colorspace by default (instead of “unknown”).

The OpenGL scene view now supports depth of field and Bokeh in all lighting modes. Turn Camera depth of field on in the display options and look through a camera to see depth of field in the scene view.
The OpenGL view now supports volumetric light and shadow effects through a view-only volume attached to the frustum of the camera.
When you lock the viewer to a camera, the view menu now has a red background (in addition to the lock icon on the right side) to give more noticeable feedback that changing the view will move/rotate the camera.
The OpenGL view now displays lighting and shadows through volume objects.
Hidden Line Invisible shading mode no longer obscures the background image.
The GlTF ROP no longer writes string attributes not supported by the glTF specification. Fixed a crash when exporting vertex attributes that need to be promoted in some geometry.

Wire nodes together quickly in the network editor by holding J and drawing over them.

You can now move the cursor right using the ⇥ Tab key in spreadsheets.
To resize brushes in the viewport, hold ⌃ Ctrl + ⇧ Shift and drag with LMB.

You can now build custom handles using Python. The current API is very low-level. Future versions of Houdini will have higher-level APIs to make it easier to create your own custom handles.
New Drawable Python API for drawing guides/UI in the viewer.
“Gadget” Drawable can draw line, face, and point guides in the viewer.
States can now find primitives/points under the mouse much more efficiently than doing a ray intersection.
Production-ready support for Python 3.7.

You can now create dynamic radial menus where the contents of the menu are generated by a script.
You can now assign custom radial menus to hotkeys in the network editor. The network editor now includes a default navigation radial menu bound to the N key.