LOOK DEVELOPMENT
Solaris, Karma and Copernicus have evolved into powerful procedural environments for scene assembly, rendering, and texturing. New instancing, painting, baking, and ML-powered tools accelerate production while delivering greater artistic control, scalability, and integration across Houdini workflows.
SOLARIS
Houdini 22 delivers major advances across Solaris and Karma, making world building, layout, look development, and rendering more unified and interactive. New USD-native workflows, powerful procedural tools, and rendering improvements help artists create richer scenes with greater speed, control, and creative flexibility.
WORLD BUILDING | Houdini 22 expands Solaris with major investments in layout, world building, and set dressing to create richer, more detailed environments.
INSTANCE | Solaris instancing adds interactive painting, Hydra-powered procedural scattering, dynamic masking, and rich variation controls for efficient, art-directed environment creation.
SCENE | Deferred procedural scattering efficiently populates massive environments with dynamic masking and art-directed controls while keeping USD scenes lightweight and responsive.
LIGHT BLOCKERS | New Karma light blockers provide precise artistic control over lighting, defining customizable regions where light is blocked or allowed.
TEXTURE MATERIAL LIBRARY | The new Texture Material Library tightly connects Copernicus, Solaris materials, and Karma, enabling seamless procedural texturing with immediate visual feedback.
IMAGE FILTERS | The Image Filter node brings USD-based post-processing stacks that work seamlessly across supported renderers such as Karma and RenderMan.
LAYOUT TOOLS
Houdini 22 streamlines Solaris scene assembly by bringing more USD workflows directly into SOPs. Unified layout tools, improved scene editing, and enhanced interactive controls make building, organizing, and refining complex environments faster, more intuitive, and better suited to iterative production workflows.
USD IN SOPS | Solaris brings USD component building into the geometry context [SOPs], streamlining scene assembly, instancing, and pivot editing within a single, familiar workflow.
EDIT LOP | Enhanced Solaris Edit LOP enables physics-based scene editing and intuitive object clustering. You can even move around Instance mesh lights with per-instance lighting controls.
KARMA
Houdini 22 enhances Karma with higher-quality lighting, cleaner volumetric rendering, and expanded MaterialX support. New sampling techniques and shading tools produce more accurate, less noisy renders while giving artists greater creative control and improved image quality without sacrificing interactive performance.
MATERIAL X FLAKES | Karma adds the latest MaterialX features, including a flake shader plus new curvature and ambient occlusion shaders for richer materials.
EQUANGULAR | Karma improves volumetric lighting with cleaner, less noisy renders and new equiangular sampling for higher-quality results without longer render times.
COPERNICUS
Houdini 22 significantly expands Copernicus into a complete procedural texturing and image processing environment. New creative tools, integrated machine learning, seamless 3D workflows, and advanced simulation capabilities empower artists to build richer materials, effects, and real-time content within a unified, non-destructive pipeline.
GRUNGE MAPS | Procedural texture tools generate realistic grunge, fabrics, bark, and natural surface details for high-quality physically based rendering materials.
UNREAL | Copernicus Session Sync enables live, interactive material workflows with Unreal Engine, keeping procedural textures synchronized across both applications.
PAINT [BETA] | New 2D and 3D painting tools bring seamless, layer-based texture painting with customizable brushes directly into Copernicus' procedural workflow.
BAKING | New baking tools simplify cage mesh debugging, automatically identifying and correcting projection issues to produce cleaner, higher-quality baked assets for production.
TEXTURE WORKFLOWS
Houdini 22 introduces powerful procedural texturing innovations that simplify complex surface creation. New UV generation, wrinkle synthesis, and seamless cross-UV workflows give artists greater creative freedom while reducing manual work, making sophisticated materials and effects faster to build and easier to iterate.
PLANAR INFLATE | Procedurally add inflated forms and realistic wrinkles to textures and character clothing, eliminating manual sculpting while preserving flexibility.
UV SHAPE | Generate customizable procedural UV patterns, enabling complex, animated texture layouts and intricate surface effects that would be difficult to create manually.
ADJACENCY | Adjacency maps eliminate UV seams, enabling seamless simulations, textures, and procedural effects to flow naturally across complex 3D surfaces.
RIPPLE SOLVER & CAUSTICS
Houdini 22 expands Copernicus with powerful tools that make it easy to create convincing ripples, refractions, caustics, and rain effects. By combining lightweight simulations with texture-based workflows, artists can produce rich, stylized, or realistic water effects quickly and efficiently.
RIPPLE SOLVER| The new 2D Ripple Solver creates procedural surface distortions for stylized effects, motion graphics, and animated textures through flexible, combinable simulations.
POND | Combine ripples, rain, lighting, and simulation tools to create rich 2D water effects for compositing, rendering, and motion graphics.
CAUSTICS | New refraction and caustics tools generate convincing water effects from height maps, delivering realistic results without the cost of full rendering.
MACHINE LEARNING
Houdini 22 deepens its machine learning integration with practical, artist-focused tools that accelerate everyday workflows. From intelligent texture generation and image segmentation to automated mask creation, ML is seamlessly embedded into Copernicus, making advanced techniques accessible without disrupting familiar procedural workflows.
NEURAL CELLULAR AUTOMATA | Train ML on sample textures to generate scalable, repeatable patterns with controllable distortions, enabling procedural texture variations and seamless surface detail.
ML IMAGE SEGMENTATION | Integrate third-party segmentation models like SAM2 into Houdini to generate object masks seamlessly within texturing and compositing workflows.
ML MASKS | ML-powered masking learns from a handful of painted frames, automatically generating accurate masks across entire image sequences for faster workflows.