At work we updated from Houdini 16.5.473 to 16.5.496 and I noticed there is a lot of visual random fluctuations on the surface in the rendering of the Curvature VOP now.


Which is ironic in that 16.5.489 talks about fixing visual glitches with the Curvature VOP…


Anyone else notice this?

Are you seeing these fluctuations on a subd mesh? If so, it may be because now enabling subd effectively disables “smooth” mode in curvature vop, so true displacements and dicing end up affecting curvature. You may have to reduce dicing flatness or increase shading quality if low tessellation rate is causing faceting or fluctuations. It was an unfortunate but necessary change in order to fix some of the more glaring artifacts under certain situations. (compatibility notes and the docs have been updated to reflect the change)
If it's not subd (or if you can't control the fluctuations you're seeing by adjusting dicing controls), can you please file a bug with an example scene? Thank you.

I see it both on subd and manually subdivided.