Final version of Houdini 11 is finally out, beta tests are over!

Your first impression after installing H11 is graphic user interface. It is completely rewritten and you get interactive HDRI view (and color bleeding), Ambient Occlusion, soft shadows, high quality volume preview and much more! This really speeds up your working process (specially when you want to set up HDRI position).
Render view, render region and many other things like particle simulation is much faster.
Voronoi fracture asset is now added as default and of course check out new Flip solver :)

Some features listed on SideFX site:
User Interface

  • New, bezier-style connectors in the network editors
  • New tool palette in the network editor offers a gallery of nodes which can be dragged into the network.
  • Seamless integration of particles into dynamics networks and dynamics into geometry networks. This makes it easier to focus simulations on particular networks instead of simulating everything at the same time.
  • Enhancements to bundles to strengthen light-linking workflow
  • Z-up support

Vertex Normals

  • Support for vertex normals in OpenGL

Network Rendering

  • Network-distributed IPR
  • HQueue for Windows and Mac
  • Gold release of Houdini Cloud rendering tools

Volumes

  • Support for multi-resolution volumes with merging, feathering and surfacing tools

    • VEX Volume Procedural

  • Volume Quality setting in viewport
  • Camera frustum volumes with tapering values.
  • Higher quality viewport visualization of volumes

Texturing

  • Support for Disney’s “ptex” format

Point clouds

  • New point cloud surfacer with adaptive controls (generates a better surface than the existing particle fluid surfacer; ?more applicable to games)
  • New point cloud functions

Fluids

  • New Fluid Shelf tools ? target smoke, source from surface, resize voxel grid
  • SPH particle fluid solver up to twice as fast
  • Ability to rotate voxel grid to create non axis-aligned fluid container

Fur

  • More shelf tools for hair grooming
  • Control over guide hair distribution for faster interactivity while grooming
  • Combing direction can now be controlled by skin shaders
  • No need for rest attribute
  • Distributed wire solver output node

Cloth

  • Support for cloth pinching and layering
  • Direct support for non-stretchy cloth (stretch/shear/bend constraints)
  • Ability to simulate 0D cloth particles and to attach 1D cloth strings to 2D cloth surfaces – this provides as unified cloth solver for particles, wires and cloth surfaces.
  • Distributed cloth solver output node

Crowd Control

  • New CHOPS (foreach, iksolver, objectchain, transformchain, vector ) ? for crowds and more
  • New python module that lets developers easily embed C++ code into python code

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