

RIS shaders are available in the RIS Shader Network SHOP and Houdini's VOP context provides a native environment for building RIS shaders with OSL support. RenderMan 20 and RIS shading support is fully integrated into Houdini 15. Easily set up random textures and variances in material settings to give a unique look to a collection of similar items such as crowd agents. Material stylesheets create a production-level workflow for creating and managing material overrides that work well with Alembic files and packed geometry. In addition, a library of royalty-free PBR Ready Textures will be available on for use with Houdini 15's shader building tools. Houdini 15 also includes an implementation of Disney's physically-based Principled Shader which is designed to provide artistic flexibility with a minimal set of controls. Shader building has been enhanced with a new shader library, a rebuilt Shader FX 2.0 menu, layered materials and a cartoon shader.

Rendering in Houdini 15 is faster and richer with improvements to the Mantra renderer such as checkpointing and render view feedback. For working with hi-res models, new retopology tools make it easy to build low-res geometry by drawing right on top of high-res geometry. With improvements made in Houdini 14 and now 15, modellers are now able to work intuitively in the viewport with the new tweak edit workflow, edge sliding, soft selection highlighting and new tools such as PolyBridge and PolyExpand 2D. Houdini has traditionally offered strong procedural modeling sometimes at the expense of its interactive workflow. There's a lot more included than in a typical point release, as we've been able to finalize a wide range of features well ahead of our major release schedule. Houdini 15.5 delivers great production-inspired features both to our established community and our emerging user base.
