Deborah R. Fowler
Updated: Aug 13 2014
New to 13 (we are using 13.0.476 Fall quarter)
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but
important new features of 13.For a more information on 13 see also what's new in 13.0.237.
- use of alt or space for moving in the viewport window
- Experimental OpenCL - smoke and pyro solvers use OpenCL for extra speed when available. Advantage is to use all RAM on the system (GPU is limited to RAM on the video card).
What is OpenCL? - Open Computing Language - a framework for
writing programs that execute in parallel across CPUs (central
processing units), GPUs (graphics processing units), DSPs (digital
signal processors) and FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays).
OpenCL is by a non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group,
initially developed by Apple. OpenCL can be used to give an
application graphics processing unit power for non-graphical
computing. OpenCL consists of a set of headers and a shared
object. An installable client driver loader (ICD loader) must be
installed on the OS for it to work. (taken from wiki).
- Not only is Houdini using linear work space (gamma 2.2) by default - the vex texture functions that work on 8-bit images will convert from sRGB to linear (and have a srccolorspace variadic argument to specify the color space).
- under the geometry container render tab you can display low-detail proxies of geometry using the "Display as" options of points, bounding box or centroid
- vex and vop networks can now create geometry! in the attrib wrangle sop, attrib vop sop and volume vop sop, and geometry vop dop using the new addpoint, addprim and addvertex functions. Other features are new as well
- for
more see the documentation