eikonoklastes

Attribute Transfer SOP. It won't be perfect because your topology is wildly different, but it might be close enough to do the job:

The new Solaris LookDev Desktop (workspace) is very well thought out, and a big improvement over the previous Solaris workspace. The Scene Graph Tree has more vertical space, you have a bunch of useful panes beneath the viewer, and you can inspect the USD data without having to mess around with tabs or unhiding panes like you did before. Big fan.

Solaris now has a dedicated Log Viewer pane, that is preferred by Karma. This is a huge quality-of-life change over previous versions, where Karma would send its messages to the console, which is a separate pop-up window that cannot be docked. It was pretty annoying. Having everything neatly go into the Log Viewer is very nice.

Dragging keys around in the Animation Editor will automatically constrain them to the axis in which you started moving them in. This is a very nice change. Previously, there would be a separate UI element to drag them across time, and a separate one to drag them across value. With this new implementation, you get a cleaner UI and more confident key adjustments. You can also MMB-drag a selected key (or keys) without needing to have the mouse over any of them. This is also a very welcome change that reduces the work needed to move keys around. Great changes. houdini_5Tbgqb24pW.mp4

The MaterialX Geometry Color node (that reads in point colour) now sensibly defaults to Color as its signature, and not Float like it was before. Tiny change, but really nice to see even tiny things being addressed.

Karma now finally has filmic tonemapping built-in, which is great for getting a more controlled look of your render without having to mess with the colour settings of the viewport itself. It's under Image Output > Filters.

Steering this back on course, Karma CPU and XPU can both read point cloud data directly to do attribute transfers at render time. This is a massively useful feature that Mantra has, and I'm glad to see it finally come to Karma. This works independent of the mesh resolution, so it can allow for extremely efficient setups. Here is a video describing it:

Object level has a camera switcher built-in (it's called Switcher). Object level, however, has no concept of prims or prim names, whereas USD/Solaris does, and can leverage that to enable a camera switcher by using the same prim name for all the cameras that you want to switch between.

It's the officially recommended way to do that in Solaris, so I don't believe that they are even considering putting in a camera switcher (and honestly, I agree with them on this). Fully agree with you on this, though. I would love to have an actual focus target object out-of-the-box in there myself. Like @Mike Asaid, I get the frustration on not getting things that you've been looking forward to. It does not detract from the sheer amount of things that were added, though, and those things instill an enormous sense of confidence in me. I'm not talking about the high-end creature FX stuff like feathers and APEX rigging, but the sheer volume of user-friendly additions and tweaks that were made to Solaris and Karma and the Graph Editor, in addition to the many, many little things they improved all over the place - I'm still discovering them as I continue to explore.

A camera switcher can be set up very easily already by using the same prim name for all your cameras and running them through a Switch LOP. Unfortunately, no focus target option yet.

I have no personal agenda in recommending Houdini. I just genuinely believe it to be the most complete solution out there. I haven't used Blender myself, so cannot say anything about it, but I have used pretty much every other major 3D DCC out there , and to a fairly extensive degree. If you want to do a lot of character animation, Maya is the current gold standard, but Autodesk is sadly driving that app into the ground, so it's making less sense as a long-term solution. I'm not sure why @Mike Awould say Houdini is not for you. Nobody can know until you try it yourself. Whatever you decide, keep the good work going!

Houdini Indie costs $269 for 1 year. It works out cheaper if you get it for 2 years - that costs $399. Depending on where you live, the Steam version of the license might offer additional discount pricing (Steam versions do take longer to get updates though). If you're unsure, you can always start out with Houdini Apprentice, which is perpetually free and fully functional (apart from exporting to FBX and Alembic, and is limited to 720p renders that have a watermark in the bottom right corner). The "whole node thing" - yeah, there's no escaping that in Houdini, but I strongly believe that to be grotesquely overrated as a barrier. Nodes just carry information on them, and have parameters that you can tweak. If you can create a box in C4D and adjust its size and position, then you can create a node and adjust some parameters on it - there's fundamentally no difference in what it is doing. Houdini is tough to learn, I won't sugarcoat it, and maybe you decide that it's not for you, and that's fine. But if it does work out, then the payoff will be huge, because it has pretty much everything you need in one place without needing a single plugin.

A super-handy MaterialX PBR Texture Set node to load all your textures into one node. Previously, you needed a separate image node for each texture.

The Carve node now has an excellent quality of life option to account for curve length, and not just its parameterization: Before: Now:

Just to put this out there, Houdini 20 just released a massive update to their character toolset to make it more artist-friendly. Also, what horror film is complete without convincing blood splatters and other fleshy gore? Right up Houdini's street.

That is the USD Asset Gallery, meant for use in Solaris, and will load assets from anywhere on disk. Houdini does not ship with a set of USD assets (well, apart from the test geometry if you want to count those). Instead, they allow you to load your own, or even multiple asset libraries from various locations. The video on that link showed the loading of a single asset from disk (they did that twice), and then loading all assets from a folder. Then they showed some bog-standard metadata editing - tagging, starring, searching. It didn't seem very complicated.

There is a massive "little" feature that they have added in Houdini 20, and that is keyboard mapping. No, not assigning shortcuts, but mapping keys on a U.S. QWERTY keyboard (for example), to corresponding keys on an international keyboard, or keyboards with different key layouts. This is a big deal for me, someone who uses a Dvorak keyboard layout, and have had to traditionally painfully trawl through the Hotkey Editor to map each shortcut key to the correct key for my layout. Now, I can just define a "key map" that tells Houdini what the translation from Dvorak to QWERTY is, and without touching the Hotkey Editor, everything just works automagically! Very, very happy with this change. Read more about it here: What’s new Hotkeys (sidefx.com)

Tool-specific Shortcuts that were previously hard-coded, are now configurable! Thank you, SideFX. All these can be changed now, for any tool.

Significantly cleaned up Tab menu in SOPs: v19.5 vs v20

Some very handy shortcuts to manage the shape of a ramp:

Bezier handles in the ramp parameter editor:

You can now paste comma-separated values into multi-dimension parameters directly houdini_UmwJbJSZuN.mp4

Typing paths now auto-completes

Solaris: The Context Options Editor now defaults to blank, rather than being cluttered with scene default settings. Very nice.

Solaris: Extremely handy new Sublayer Style menu for all SOP-related nodes. The "Merge SOP Layer Into Existing Active Layer" option is particularly handy: