Houdini 17 includes a wealth of new features, including a GPU-accelerated multisolver for cloth, hair, soft bodies and grains, a new white water solver, a material-based destruction framework, facial autorigs, fullbody IK, enhanced animation and modeling workflows, UV autoseaming, GLTF I/O, gamedev tools and much more.
New Vellum multi-solver brings fast cloth to Houdini along with other integrated effects such as hair, soft bodies and grains. The Vellum solver is GPU-accelerated and very easy to set up and iterate.

The White Water solver has been rewritten to achieve a more organic, foamy, look with realistic cellular patterns and repellant forces and a more accurate relationship to the source FLIP sim.

Material-based destruction tools make it easier to set up and art direct destruction shots by providing tools for pre-fracturing materials such as concrete, glass and wood while automatically building constraint networks that tie the whole system together.

Terrain now includes advanced erosion tools with more control over details such as fluvial lines, river banks and debris and new hierarchical scattering for more efficient placement of elements into landscapes.

New UV tools define a fully procedural workflow that starts with automated seaming then moves on to accurate flattening and super efficient layout of the resulting UVs.

The new Retime SOP node is a powerful tool for stretching out or slowing down simulated data such as fluid sims, RBD sims and even volumes with effective interpolation and blend options for creating clean and entirely realistic results.

Interactive modeling includes a new PolyDraw shelf tool which lets you use our interactive “Topo Build” tools anywhere in your scene, without reference geometry. Improvements to snapping and alignment including fast construction plane alignment and positioning; rotation snapping; view and construction plane memories; and new geometry alignment tools.

Character animation and rigging have been improved with a newly designed timeline that supports a more animator-friendly keyframe workflow and a facial auto-rig for a complete top-to-bottom auto-rigging solution.

Houdini Engine is now more versatile with a brand new 3DS Max plug-in, a 2.0 Unity plug-in and important enhancements to the Maya and UE4 plug-ins.

GLTF Import and Export brings the “JPEG of 3D” to Houdini to provide an efficient, interoperable asset delivery format that compresses the size of 3D scenes and minimizes runtime processing.

Changelog
Include statements in the RenderProperties.json file will now have variables expanded.
Added QuadArm module, Added FK controls to clavicle/hip, fixed a number of UI issues, better calculation of QuadTail length, better QuadSpine control orientation, removed arclen expressions, removed channel reference from bone rot order.
Fixed the Switch ROP so that it’s “index” parameter expression is not evaluated every time (possibly multiple times) the network editor redraws. This should improve the performance of the network editor when looking at ROP Networks with many Switch nodes using complex expressions.
Fixed up importing glTF scene files due to bug with not expanding variables in path.
When a network editor background image can’t be laoded, no longer set an error state on the parent network. Instead, load a standard error image to make it obvious the file could not be found without interfering with node cooking.
Swapped the behvaior of horizontal and vertical swiping in the network editor with the “align” hotkey (Shift+A) pressed.