Dear Houdini 6.5 Beta testers,Houdini 7 Public Beta!

Dear Houdini 6.5 Beta testers,

We are happy to announce that Houdini 6.5 is being released as Houdini 7
with a set of new features that improves workflow in all areas of
production.

These new features have been developed in collaboration with studios and
have already shown their strength in production. The Take Manager in
particular has been widely anticipated by users for its abilities to support
the creative process. We are glad to make these features available to the
Houdini community ahead of schedule, and hope that you will put them to good
use in your pipelines.

With your generous help, we plan to briefly extend the beta phase to allow
for additional testing of the new features. Please discard any cuts of
Houdini 6.5 that you may have been testing, and download Houdini 7 from the
usual locations. Please note that Houdini 7 will require a Houdini 7 license
to run commercially. Beta testers running Houdini Apprentice will have their
licenses updated automatically as long as they are hooked to the internet.

As Houdini 7 is being tested, we continue working on Houdini's next
generation Dynamics engine, which will be going into alpha testing very
soon. Thank you again for your continued support of Houdini and for helping
us release a software that is stable and speaks to your needs.

Robert Magee
Senior Product Specialist
Side Effects Software Inc.

Below is a list of the new features that can be added to the 6.5 feature
list posted earlier:

Take Manager - The Take Manager gives artists the ability to capture and
evaluate creative decisions before signing off on a shot. Each Take provides
a snapshot of a creative decision that can then be layered, compared,
rendered, merged, or deleted without affecting the base scene file. Once the
shot has been approved then the chosen Takes can be sent directly to the
renderer or collapsed back into the scene. Basically, each Take is a layer
of parameters and node flags in a Houdini session. The Take manager also
supports user-defined render passes that provide rendering efficiencies
because all the passes would be generated from the same scene file.

GUI for Operator Bundles - Operator bundles are a heterogeneous extension of
the Operator Groups. Houdini 7 now provides an accessible and intuitive user
interface to bundles.

Network boxes - This organizational tool lets users structure their
procedural networks then collapse them for fast access later. Now networks
will be easier to read and navigate as they get more complex.

Flipbook blocking - Flipbook blocking is an image-based blocking technique
for animators. Rather than timing actual 2D animation, the artist loads a
blocked sequence into the Mplay flipbook and re-times the images without the
need to adjust the actual keys. When the images have been timed properly
then the adjustments can be sent back to the scene and the keys will be
moved accordingly.

New Channel List - The Channel List lets animators view and edit the values
of the scoped channels in an intuitive fashion. (This is work in progress
and will provide Channel Box-like functionality for animators)

OpenEXR support - OpenEXR 1.2 is now supported. It has support for
luminance-chroma images, a new slightly lossy 32 bit float compression (from
Pixar) and a revamped Tile format.

Other features:

- Much faster rendering of motion-blurred animation and subdivision surfaces
with Mantra.\
- Much greater interactive performance in the 3D viewport.

- *Many* feature and performance enhancements to the Channel Editor

- New ability to constrain the movement of the brush in all the SOP paint
tools to the x-axis, y-axis or a diagonal along the construction plane.

- New "viewhome" hscript command to home named viewports.

- New environment variable, HOUDINI_SCRIPT_PATH, which specifies the paths
Houdini should search when looking for a .tcl, .tk, .cmd, or .java script
file when running the tcl, tk, source, or java commands.

- Added an option ("-b") to the oporder command which specifies that all
listed nodes would be moved to the beginning of the operator list.

- Added the "-s" option to the opfind command. This option specifies that
the opfind command should not recurse into operator networks.

- Angular Velocity POP now supports negative velocities as well.

- Added a new option to the Operator Type Manager, "Leave Values When
Defaults Change". If turned on, this option tells Houdini that any existing
nodes should keep their parameter values even if they are at the defaults
when a new definition for the operator type is loaded.

- Object subnetworks can now be contained inside other network types.

- Added otinuse command, which outputs information about which OTLs
and operator types are in use in a Hip file or portion of a Hip file.

- A new object called Rivet is implemented. This object attaches to geometry
points of another object and follows it as the geometry moves and deforms.
For the rivet to be attached properly three points need to be specified to
construct a surface frame. Rivet object is placed at the origin of that
frame and is oriented according to the frame axes. If only one point is
selected on the geometry, the rivet object will position itself at that
point, but it is going to remain aligned with the world axes.

- Added a File OP dialog for node creation, accessed via 'Ctrl+Tab'. You can
POP it up and select multiple files or file sequences. The dialog will
create 1 OP for each file or file sequence (foo$F.ext) selected. The current
OP network type determines the types of files shown.

- Removing the hconnect proto install. Since openport/hcommand now uses
sockets and can work with telnet, hconnect is no longer needed.

- The Layer COP can now accept any number of inputs.

- Added opisquitting expression function which returns 1 if Houdini is in
the process of shutting down, 0 otherwise.

- Added -l option to the hscript opparm command to list out the parameters
for a given OP. This is similar to the -d option but does not display the
values of the parameters.

- Split out the Composite COP into specific compositing COPs: Over, Under,
Atop, Inside, Outside, Add, Subtract, Multiply, Screen, Diff, Average and
Xor.

- The behavior of hserver in bad conditions has been improved significantly.
As well, applications now have a default grace period to run before they
terminate due to license failure. This grace period is only allowed if there
was successful license checkout at some point in the past.

- Added the Degrain COP, which attempts to remove grain without affecting
features.

- Added the Corner Ramp COP. Initially setup as a 4 corner ramp, this node
is also capable of interpolating any number of user-defined ramp points.

- Added the ninput() VEX function to the COP context. It returns a 3x3
matrix of the specified pixel and its 8 neighbors.

- Added the Emboss COP, which can do simple bump-mapping lighting.

- Added ability for user to apply images to custom panel buttons

- Added '-x' option to "opparm" command. The '-x' option will generate
hscript commands that can be used to re-create the channel.

- Added chopls hscript command which lists all the track data of the given
chop.

- opset command now takes -V option that sets the visibility of an object.
It is a bit smarter than setting the display flag on/off, because it will
also try to set the parent's visible children (visible objects) parameter to
make an operator visible.

- Removing the licensing checks from spy.

- It is now possible to set the audio scrubbing rate from within MPlay. This
can be accomplished using either the -W command-line parameter or the "Load
Audio" window.

- Added new ObjectGroupMerge SOP to proto_install

- For the Lattice SOP & Point Deformations, added support for point-specific
radii, and support for the $PT variable.

- PolyExtrude now has an option in Local mode to "Keep Shared Points
Together" which keeps the points originating from the same point together in
the extruded faces.

- Adding a new expression function, opfullpathfrom. This function returns
the full path to a node that is specified relative to a second node path.

- Added a Turn POP, which changes the direction of the velocity of particles
given an axis and turn speed.

- The image library now supports PNG files (.png).

- Adding arrow key, history, and tab completion to hscript on Linux. It can
be disabled by setting the HSCRIPT_NO_HISTORY environment variable to 1.

- Added x and y rotation lock when tumbling geometry in the 3D viewport,
accessed by pressing alt+LMB in viewport. Lock about x or y axis determined
by initial mouse position change.

- There is now an option in the mplay display options (and COPs image
viewer) to have the display gamma affect the background color. It is located
in the Correction tab in the Display Options dialog ("d") with the gamma
settings.

- Added camera crop handles. They are rendered only when you are in camera
state and viewport is in corresponding camera view.

- The visibility of a camera linked to the viewer now can be quickly toggled
from the menu located to the left of the camera menu that specifies which
camera is linked to the viewer.

- The Measure SOP can now measure curvature.

- New Scatter SOP generates random points over surfaces (with a fairly
uniform distribution). Can be used as aid to sub-surface scattering shaders.

- The COP viewer now explicitly supports three modes:

1) Follow Display - Same behaviour as before. The images of COPs with their
display flags set are shown in the viewports, along with the handles and
states corresponding to those nodes.

2) Follow Display / Current - The images of COPs with their display flags
set are shown. However, instead of showing the display nodes' handles and
states, the current node's handles and state are shown over the displayed
images (if the current node is upstream, or an eventual input node, of the
display node). This mode is useful for editing earlier nodes while viewing
later output.

3) Follow Current - The image, handles and state of the current node are
always shown. The display flags have no effect.

- Added viewport comment parameter to the Camera and Light objects. Any
string specified in that parameter will be displayed in the 3D viewport when
viewing from that camera or light.

- New display option in the 3D viewport: "Display Bounding Box".

- Added new option to render geometry in different shading modes while
modifying view. Shading mode is determined by user defined thresholds for
the object render time in milliseconds. A new shading mode under this option
is "Bounding Box". Also, removed "Move Wireframe option.

- Added the RotoShape COP, the successor to RotoSpline. RotoShape has better
viewport interaction, supports the drawing of multiple splines and
compositing operations between the splines. It also fixes some of the old
deficiencies in Rotospline, such as better selection handling, point
insertion and NURBS curve support.

- Most of the COP generators now have an optional mask input. The generated
data is restricted to the area defined by the mask (or outside the mask).
The generators affected are: Color, CornerRamp, Font, Geometry, Noise, Ramp,
RotoShape, Shape and VEX Generate.

- Added a 'Fast Interactive Cooking' toggle button to the COP2 viewer, in
the top right corner of the interface.

- The View-Flipbook dialog now has an entry for Background Images. A
background image sequence can be specified, which will appear behind the
rendered elements of the viewport in the flipbook.

- The audio waveform can now be displayed on the mplay playbar. Soon to be
implemented in the main Houdini playbar.

- Streamlined the UI of the playbar, embedded dopesheet, and frame range
slider.

- The option to autoscope channels based on the object selection has been
generalized and made consistent. It is now possible to clear the channel
scope by deselecting all the nodes.

- Added a new option, -u, to the opadd command. This option causes the new
node to not load its contents if it is a custom subnet operator with locked
contents. The new node will be created empty and unlocked.

- Added 'Bypass Selected Nodes' to the worksheet menu (Ctrl+RMB) and
assigned it the hotkey Ctrl+b.

- It is now possible to "Create New SHOP Type" from an RSL VOP Network.

- Added the Mask COP, which masks out an area of the input using a plane
from the mask input.

- Added the chgpopulate command and menu options in the Operator pane menu
and node RMB menu to create nested channel groups corresponding to node
parameter folders.

Obsolete Operators:
===================

The following ops have been removed from the user interface. Pre-Houdini 7
hip
files containing these operators will still load fine but new operators of
this
type cannot be created.

- Arm SOP
- Blend SOP (replaced by Blendshape)
- Boolean SOP
- CaptureEdit SOP
- CapturePaint SOP
- Joint SOP
- Limb SOP
- Model SOP
- Skeleton SOP
- RotoSpline COP