• Individual handles for pin selections with the Vellum Brush SOP, which allow you to easily fold, drape, and stretch cloth. This is especially useful for set dressing. For more information, see Vellum Brush.

  • Crease/Ruffle now works with Vellum brush on tetrahedral meshes.

  • New Default Thickness parameter on the Vellum Solver, in both SOPs and DOPs. If the incoming simulation or collision geometry has no pscale attribute, it will be set to this value.

  • The Vellum Solver now uses a coupled solve for Tetrahedral Stretch constraints with Volume Preservation enabled, in which both constraints are solved simultaneously, rather than sequentially as in previous versions. The resulting solve is faster, preserves volume better, and has fewer artifacts at extreme deformations. This improves the look of most muscle simulations.

  • Wind shadow lets you use collision geometry to block wind from affecting the vellum geometry (External Shadow) and vellum geometry to block wind from affecting other parts of the vellum geometry (Self Shadow). This makes your Vellum simulations look a lot more realistic. It can be used for cloth, grains, particles, and hair.

    No shadow on the left, shadow on the right.
    Shadow on the left, no shadow on the right.
  • Three new DOPs for creating wind shadow: POP Mask from Shadow, POP Attribute Blur, and POP Wind Shadow. Alternatively, you can apply wind shadow in SOPs using the Vellum Solver SOP.

  • New masking options on the Vellum Rest Blend SOP and DOP nodes for controlling transition effects.

  • Faster graph coloring for tetrahedral meshes with significantly reduced GPU memory usage.

  • Ability to run Vellum Fluid with a 64-bit solve.

Content library examples

Download the Zombie Clothes file on the Content Library to see how to create clothes and how to tear them to make “zombie” clothes. It also shows how to make a belt, a hood, and a veil.

Download the Wind Shadow file on the Content Library to see the use of Wind Shadowing within the Vellum Solver.

What’s new in Houdini 20