Jakob Ringler dives into the cutting-edge Machine Learning additions shaking up Copernicus and Solaris in Houdini 22. He breaks down the massive performance upgrades coming to Neural Cellular Automata (NCA), showing how a new split architecture allows you to easily train, upscale, and procedurally deform tileable patterns right within COPs. The talk also highlights seamless mesh mapping using adjacency rasterization, intelligent alpha masking via Meta SAM 2, depth map extraction using Microsoft MOGI 2, and an extensive native toolkit to train, rasterize, and dynamically relight 3D Gaussian Splats inside Houdini.