Solid Angle Houdini to Arnold 3.2.1 for Houdini

Solid Angle has unveiled Arnold for Houdini 3.2.1. This add-on provides a tight bridge to the Arnold renderer from within the standard Houdini interface, in a way that is familiar to both Houdini users and Arnold users in Maya or Softimage.

HtoA 3.2.1 - Release Date: 12 December 2018

Enhancements
- Packed primitive translation (htoa#381)
- CopyToPoints SOP should Instance with Pack and Instance option (htoa#1133)
- Translate packed fragment primitives (htoa#1142)
- Inherit materials for packed primitives (htoa#1139)
- Memory usage in CopyToPoints SOP translation when instancing packed primitives (htoa#1148)
- Deformation motion blur for packed primitives when instancing (htoa#1152)
- Add toon UI for sheen parameters (htoa#1125)
- Add cryptomatte AOVs to ROP (htoa#1132)
- Add the velvet preset for Standard Surface (htoa#1138)
- Improved sampling of photometric lights: Photometric lights now take advantage of the same techniques used for point lights. This can show significant reductions in noise, especially for large lights illuminating surfaces at grazing angles (rim lighting, for example). (core#7646)
- Separate azimuthal roughness in standard_hair: You can now specify different roughness values for the azimuthal and longitudinal distributions on the standard_hair shader. A new roughness_azimuthal parameter is used when roughness_anisotropic is enabled. The roughness parameter is then used to control the longitudinal roughness. When roughness_anisotropic=false, roughness controls both the azimuthal and longitudinal distributions as before. (htoa #1137, core#7400)
- License manager priorities: Order in which license managers are checked can now be specified by the environment variable ARNOLD_LICENSE_MANAGER which contains a comma separated list of the following tokens (clm, rlm or none). If ARNOLD_LICENSE_MANAGER is not set, Arnold will use the default priorities of rlm,clm. (core#7384)
- Linkable toon uv/angle_threshold: The NPR toon shader's uv_threshold and angle_threshold parameters are now linkable. (core#7713)
- Adaptive Subdivs Interruption: It is now faster to interrupt ongoing adaptive subdivision (core#7722)
- Cryptomatte 1.1.0: Upgraded Cryptomatte to 1.1.0 which contains the fix: "Preview AOVs are now always displayed in display drivers, even when preview_in_exr is disabled". (core#7631)
- Upgrade OIIO and OSL: OIIO has been upgraded to 2.0.0 and OSL to 1.10.1 (core#6040, core#7283)
- Profiling node stages: Profiling of node_init and node_update have been added so that it's possible to see which nodes are consuming significant time in these stages. (core#7313)
Incompatible changes
- Round corners default radius: The default value of round_corner.radius has been changed from 1.0 to 0.01 (core#7624)
- Photometric lights with radius: Just like their point_light counterparts, points within the sphere defined by photometric_light.radius will no longer be illuminated. (core#7646)
- Minimum OSX version requirement raised from 10.8 to 10.9 In order to upgrade to a more recent version of OIIO, the minimum required OSX version has been raised from 10.8 (Mountain Lion) to 10.9 (Mavericks). (core#7318)
Fixes
- Alembic primitives IPR frame update issue (htoa#1119)
- IPR crash on camera update with alembic procedural (htoa#1122)
- Crash rendering packed agents with deformation motion blur (htoa#1144)
- Assign Material ROP Fixes (htoa#1129)
- Fix makeTx texture generation for duplicate textures (htoa#1131)
- Auto generate .tx textures on light textures (htoa#1068)
- Round corners default radius fixed (htoa#1126)
- Multiple concurrent users on the same node each check out a license with CLM (core#7359)
- Uncaught exception during OptiX device selection (core#6925)
- Toon Render: random issues with keylight initialization (core#7436)
- Shadow artifacts in Overlapped Polygons (core#7588)
- Randomly corrupted matrix on procedural lights (core#7593)
- Noice: AOV variance is not found if added using LPE AOVs (core#7596)
- photometric_lights crash when radius is non zero (core#7605)
- Round Corners: not working with transmission (core#7623)
- Round corners: switch default radius to 0.01 (core#7624)
- crash when writing to an invalid profile.json (core#7629)
- uv_camera crashes with tiny triangles without normals (core#7632)
- noice requiring more output paths than inputs (core#7643)
- Alembic Scalar property being translated as Array (core#7663)
- alembic crash with bucket callback in Arnold < 5.2 (core#7682)
- Threaded subdivs crash on render abort (core#7691)
- Disable OptiX when bad NVML is found (core#7698)
- degenerate camera_projection produces invalid texture lookups (core#7712)
- Threaded Subdivs: fix interrupt request latency regression (core#7722)
- Crash in materialx due to invalid/unrecognized node types (core#7723)

About Arnold for Houdini. HtoA provides a bridge to the Arnold renderer from within the standard Houdini interface. Having been in beta for several months, the plugin has already been used in production by many studios, including Prime Focus World for Hercules and Vampire Academy, Milk VFX for the Sherlock and Doctor Who TV series, and Framestore NY for the Captain Morgan commercials.


About Solid Angle. Solid Angle is the technology company behind the Arnold rendering software. With offices in Madrid and London, Solid Angle’s customers include ILM, Framestore, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Rodeo FX, Luma Pictures, Image Engine, The Moving Picture Company, Digic Pictures, The Mill and Psyop. Arnold was designed to efficiently process the complex geometric datasets required for feature-length CGI animation and big-budget visual effects, while at the same time simplifying the pipeline. This unique renderer has been used to create the VFX seen in “Guardians of the Galaxy”, “Elysium, “Gravity”, “Pacific Rim”, Marvel's “The Avengers”, and “Alice in Wonderland”, to name just some. Marcos Fajardo is the founder of Solid Angle and lead architect of Arnold. The software is now available as a standalone renderer, as a C++ API and as a set of plug-ins for leading 3D applications such as Maya, Softimage and Katana on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

About Side Effects Software. Side Effects Software is a world leader in the development of Houdini, our advanced 3D animation and special effects software for use in film, commercials and video games. Side Effects Software has been recognized three times with Scientific and Technical awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Houdini family of animation software offers digital artists an unprecedented level of power, flexibility and control based on award-winning procedural technology. The comprehensive feature set includes: modeling, rigging, animation, particle effects, dynamics, compositing, integrated rendering, and more. All Houdini applications work together seamlessly and are available for the Mac OS X, Linux and Windows operating systems.

Product: Solid Angle Houdini To Arnold
Version: 3.2.1
Supported Architectures: x64
Website Home Page : www.solidangle.com
Language: english
System Requirements: PC / MacOsx / Linux
Supported Operating Systems: Windows 7 x64 (H16: vc14 and H17: vc14.1) / MacOsx X 10.8+ (clang7.3) / Linux x86_64 (H16: gcc4.8 and H17: gcc6.3)
Compatibility: *
Size: 451.3 mb

* This release uses Arnold 5.2.2.0 and OpenVDB 4.0.0. Binaries available for the following Houdini, Houdini FX, Houdini Indie and Houdini Education production builds: 16.5.634, 17.0.352, 17.0.416. Please note that Houdini Apprentice does not support third-party renderers and thus cannot run HtoA.