Lighting buttons/icons on the right side of the viewport have more functionality, e.g. for inspecting certain technical aspects of a scene. Lighting artists can now see where light might come from or why a light doesn’t appear in an AOV.

Improved Disable Materials. When turned on, materials don’t even appear in the viewport render anymore.

Performance monitor with improved time tracking for prim patterns.

The Geometry Spreadsheet is more flexible. The UI now switches between Scene Graph Tree and Geometry Spreadsheet, depending on whether you're working in LOPs or SOPs, e.g. a SOP Modify LOP. When you dive inside the SOP Modify and turn on Hide Other Objects, then you will be able to work in the SOP version of the USD scene without recooking.

A new Collection and primitive tree configuration button on the Scene Graph Tree lets you decide what UI elements to show. This avoids collapsing and UI changes when clicking UI dividers. The options are

Added Karma Physical Sky to the LOP Lights & Cameras shelf.

Improvements on the Scene Graph Tree.

Improved Render Gallery.

A new Show/Hide snapshot strip icon opens a limited version of the Render Gallery in the viewport with a gallery strip. You can find the button in the lower left corner of the viewport. The fully-featured Render Gallery is still available as a pane from New Pane Tab Type ▸ Solaris ▸ Render Gallery.

A new SolarisLookDev desktop is available from the Desktops menu.

Reorganized and more user-friendly Scene Graph menu. To open this menu, right-click on any entry in the Scene Graph tree. The menu is now subdivided into groups to make editing easier. For example, lookdev artists normally promote parameters to other users through interfaces. The newly structured menu helps to ease this task.

A new Editor Nodes tab in the Geometry Spreadsheet pane contains all nodes that have been edited in the current session. Right-click on an entry and choose Jump to Node to directly go to the node and see its parameters without searching the entire network.

The Show layer details as tree button is now located on the Scene Graph Layers pane. When you click the button, you can see a layer’s specs and all details for deep debugging of USD scenes.

Click the button in the Render Gallery or in MPlay to the render stats sidebar, containing information such as memory usage, time to first pixel, shader calls, and many more.

The renderstatsreport utility generates an HTML render report that lists statistics extracted from a rendered EXR file.

The renderstatsoverlay utility generates a (possibly resized) JPG or PNG with render stats burned into it.

New Merge Point Instancers LOP. In a point instancer prim, each point in a geometry is replaced at view or render time by an instance of the geometry of one of the prims with a “prototype” relationship to the instancer. The LOP lets you efficiently merge multiple point instancers.

The RBD Destruction LOP lets you transform pieces at render time through invoke graphs. This node basically is setting up a render-time procedural to do the Transform Pieces setup. This way it only needs to store the rest positions of the mesh and the points representing the animated transforms of the pieces. This results in a smaller footprint on disk.

A new Geometry Clip Sequence eases and accelerates the task of storing value clips. Value clips allow you to split large data across multiple files. This node should be your first choice when working with value clips.

The Material Library LOP now provides a filtered Tab menu. The filtered menu is focused on specific Material Builders/Subnets for Karma, Material X and VOPs. This makes the initial tab menu far less imposing, and makes the VOP representation more closely follow what happens in USD.

The USD ROP node’s Files to Save parameter now affects the saving of volume files generated by a save operation as well as USD files.

The USD Render ROP now deletes both temporary USD and VDB files post-render, rather than just USD files.

When the Duplicate LOP creates collections with duplicate names, the node now creates a collection from all requested contents. In previous versions, contents were only created from the “last” request.

The Attribute VOP LOP and Attribute Wrangle LOP now have multi-frame and subframe sampling parameters, like the Edit Properties LOP and Transform LOP. Only operations in the VEX code that set attributes actually get applied to the stage for any but the first time sample.

Merge LOP performance improvements.

The Material Linker LOP now defaults to direct bindings, rather than collection-based binding. It also supports referencing materials from catalogs.

Value Clip LOP simplifies storing data sets in separate files (so-called value clips).

The Test Geometry: Shaderball LOP now uses the new USD shader ball by default along with some material/texture map fixes. Note that the legacy shader ball is still available.

The Sublayer LOP now has collapsible sections, a Load Payloads checkbox, the file path is visible, and rarely used parameters are hidden.

The Configure Primitive LOP grew a lot and now has collapsible sections and a simplified UI.

The [Camera LOP provides new viewport editing modes. With ⇧ Shift + A you can change F-Stop and ⇧ Shift + E lets you adjust Exposure. You can change both values with the mouse_wheel.

Support for UNC paths for foreground and background images in the Camera LOP.

TheKarma Cryptomatte LOP now creates render vars as float3 instead of color3f.