Whats New in Houdini 6.5

Interface

Sticky object - This new object Type provide a mechanism for surface constraint animation
Network editor enhancements such as the ability to display various dependencies between nodes, the ability to connect multiple tiles and disconnect multiple tiles at once and the ability to wire tiles between mutliple windows in the same network.
Snap to orientation -
New Expression Editor (multi-line, inline functions, comments, etc...)
New enhancements to transform handles:
- Gimbal mode to rotate handles.
- Translate handles show the positive axis with an arrow
- Translate handles can translate to perpendicular plane
Pane linking behaviour is now different.
New menu toggle option in some handles to always align them to world axes.
Channel aliasing and parm label aliasing of dynamic parms
Ability to select the boundary of an existing selection. B hotkey.
Ability to customize the contents of the "Jump" menu in the File Chooser.
File ops now remember the last 5 files loaded.
The Find Node dialog allows you to select all the nodes that match a search
Many mplay enhancements (audio support, sequencing, blocking)
File browser can now sort by type and modification time.
Added new menu command "File|Run Script..." which allows the user to run a script.
New global object option to "Keep Position When Moving"
Parameters that are changing due to a handle (or XCF) are highlighted.
Added option to disable clicking on the wire connections.
The group display buttons (for OBJ tiles) show the number of objects in that group that are visible.
Object subnets and custom object subnets allow you to specify the visible children.
Custom color palettes can be added to the color palette menu.

Digital Assets

Ability to set custom help on a per-parm basis in the Type Properties dialog.
New Selector page in the Type Properties dialog.
Ability to multi-select in the Parm and Handles pages of the Type Prop dialog.
New "On Input Changed", "On Name Changed", script in the Events page of the Type Properties dialog
Export To Type Properties is available on parm menus now (hotkey Alt-MMB) allows the parm to be exported to whatever Type Properties dialog that is currently open.
Parms in Type Properties Dialog are now shown in a tree-view fashion.
OTLs can now save their contents in a compressed format.
A new safeguard option found in the Operator Type Manager Definition tab which allows Digital Asset creators to hide the Allow Editing of Contents/Match Current Definition menu item.

Modeling

Edit SOP now includes sculpting and ability to mirror the edits when pulling points.
New MatchTopology SOP
New AttribComposite SOP
SOP unloading (opunload, sopcache)
Attribute Mirror SOP allows mirroring of several attributes at once.
New AttribStringEdit SOP
Two new SOPs: Color SOP, UVQuickShade SOP (they are implemented as Digital Assets)
Extended Info dialog for SOPs

Animation

The timeline can now show ticks for the keyframes and has dopesheet functionality.
The path handle has been hooked up to tools other than geo/pose (eg. blend).
Many enhancements to the graph editor such as:
- Shift-N hides channel names
- Channel groups support nesting
- Treeview for channel groups
- Copying keys copies slope as well (not just key value)
Flipbook allows choosing which objects are visible (through a new option in the viewwrite command).
Improved openGL flipbooking
Pretransform CHOP now has input and output pivot parameters which are used in the interpretation and generation of results.
Object CHOP can now compute the full transform matrix between two objects
Can specify custom RMB menu items in the popup menu for channel groups.

Character Setup

Ability to display the IK Critical Zone to help avoid flipping.
New Paint Capture Layer object-level tool.
New Morph object-level tool for building pose library and tweaking poses.
New Align Capture Pose tool.
New Capture Layer Paint SOP
New Mix SOP (formerly known as Dynamic Blend)
Frame 0 is no longer used as the capture rest frame. There is now a capture pose which can be accessed under Settings > Object > Capture Pose.
New CaptureMerge SOP
CaptureMirror has an Average Weight option.
New commands "bonealigncapture"
New SOP: CaptureOverride
New system for capturing geometry by capture regions.

Lighting

The shading quality parm in light and cam objects is now accessible in the UI.
Light handle won't show the look-at for point lights.

Rendering

New VEX Builder context for creating Renderman shaders
RenderMan supported by the IPR Render tool in the viewer pane.
OpenGL Render ROP can now render Polygon-As-Subdiv

Compositing

New COPs: Color Curve, Hue Curve, Defocus, LumaMatte, and SwitchAlpha
Changes to workflow in the Rotospline COP.
New COPs: Unpin, Border
Expand COP can now handle per-pixel variable expansion and vertical/ horizontal expand/dropoff sizes can be different.
Added a new VEX COP context global variable PXSC (proxy pixel scale)

Effects

new AttribTransfer POP
Collisions in POPs have been reworked to support colliding against moving and potentially deformable objects.

Miscellaneous

A grace period after losing contact with license server allows Houdini to continue running until hopefully the connection is re-established.
New options to the helpbrowser command
New chrefit command fits channel data to cubic curve and assigns new keys. criteria, could make it easy to change the parms on all nodes of a certain type and so forth.
New mechanism for limiting the maximum number of backup files created (HOUDINI_MAX_BACKUP_FILES).
New mechanism for customizing the name of the backup files created (HOUDINI_AUTOSAVE_FILENAME).
Most Recently Used histories are kept with load file fields.
New otprefer command.
New chsop expression function similar to chs but is intended for fetching node names.
Added panepath command
Hscript and textport and script files support '\' at the end of the line to continue the line.
chcommit command has several new options.
Added commands chblockbegin and chblockend which can be put around blocks of chadd, chkey commands to speed up execution of scripts.