Houdini 12.5 released

• Cloud FX – a complete cloud sculpting and rendering toolset.
• Ocean FX – offers the ability to deform geometry into animated oceanscapes using volumes. An Ocean FX Wave Tank tool lets you further generate a FLIP fluid simulation derived from an animated ocean surface. For even more realism, a unified Whitewater solver is available to create spray, foam and churn based on the underlying FLIP fluid sim. A new Mist tool can then be used to further enhance the whitewater effects.
• OpenVDB volume sculpting tools – native support for the open source C++ library dedicated to efficient storage and manipulation of sparse volumetric data, which is developed and maintained by DreamWorks Animation.
• Optimized lighting and rendering pipeline – new relighting options and optimizations in IPR (Interactive Photorealistic Rendering).
• Built-in support for delayed-load Alembic primitives – results in much lighter data passing to either the viewport or the Mantra renderer.
• Various other improvements such as volume lights, new Bullet RBD constraints, a new PolySoup primitive type for optimizing large models, point primitives, a surface remesher, etc.

Read the and complete on Side Effects’ website.