Here are all the new additions and updates!

Houdini

• Supported on the latest production builds of Houdini 20.0, 20.5, and the upcoming 21.0.
• Houdini 19.0 and 19.5 have been dropped from this version of Axiom.

UI

• Reorganized the UI to be less cluttered. Less frequently used parameters have been moved to the advanced tab.
• Combustion has been moved to the forces tab.
• Licensing and profiling have been moved to the advanced tab.

Core

• More accurate collisions. Less value loss with animated colliders. Fluid can move through narrow regions more easily.

Performance

• Optimized Jacobi kernels for project-non-divergent which makes it 35% faster overall.
• Intel’s Thread Building Blocks (TBB) is now default for CPU multi-threading operations. This makes multi-threaded CPU operations significantly faster on some platforms. It uses the same TBB version that is used by Houdini. This can be disabled via the AXIOM_THREAD_USE_TBB environment variable.
• Many small performance optimizations.
• Solver is anywhere from 5-15% faster overall.

API & OS Support

• Cuda is now out of beta.
• Metal is more stable when doing operations that involve many iterations such as project-non-divergent and diffusion.
• You can set the AXIOM_COMPUTE_OCL_EXTRA_COMPILER_OPTIONS environment variable to add extra OpenCL compiler options.