Cherry-pick remaining 1.3 milestone PRs onto release-1.3

[adenzler-nvidia]

Description

Cherry-pick the remaining 11 PRs in the 1.3 Release milestone (#9) from main onto release-1.3. All other milestone PRs were merged before the #3080 branch point and are already present on the branch. Applied in chronological merge order; all 11 picked cleanly with no conflicts.

Cherry-picked PRs:

• Drop fixed 1.5 removal target from SDF deprecations #3072 Drop fixed 1.5 removal target from SDF deprecations
• Skip generate_api test outside source checkouts #3083 Skip generate_api test outside source checkouts
• Render ground planes as Viser grids #3078 Render ground planes as Viser grids
• Render tiled-camera heightfields via the mesh path #3088 Render tiled-camera heightfields via the mesh path
• Mark SolverKamino as experimental #3065 Mark SolverKamino as experimental
• API Cleanup #3039 API Cleanup
• Mark SolverVBD as experimental #3068 Mark SolverVBD as experimental
• Deprecate ls_parallel option in SolverMuJoCo #3096 Deprecate ls_parallel option in SolverMuJoCo
• Fix ball joint conversion for SolverMuJoCo #2981 Fix ball joint conversion for SolverMuJoCo
• Fix numpy.bool_ forward-compat breakage in SolverMuJoCo and tests #3098 Fix numpy.bool_ forward-compat breakage in SolverMuJoCo and tests
• Reinstate SensorRaycast #3097 Reinstate SensorRaycast

Checklist

• New or existing tests cover these changes
• The documentation is up to date with these changes
• CHANGELOG.md has been updated (if user-facing change)

Test plan

Each PR was tested and merged on main; this PR only relocates those commits onto release-1.3. Verified a clean cherry-pick with no conflict markers and a coherent CHANGELOG.md (#3097 removes the unreleased "Remove SensorRaycast" entry; #3072 retargets SDF deprecations from "Newton 1.5" to "a future release").

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[codecov]

Codecov Report

❌ Patch coverage is 79.80769% with 63 lines in your changes missing coverage. Please review.
✅ All tests successful. No failed tests found.

Files with missing lines	Patch %	Lines
newton/_src/sensors/sensor_raycast.py	80.00%	28 Missing ⚠️
newton/_src/viewer/viewer_viser.py	5.26%	18 Missing ⚠️
newton/_src/sim/model.py	93.33%	5 Missing ⚠️
newton/_src/sensors/sensor_tiled_camera.py	0.00%	4 Missing ⚠️
...ewton/_src/sensors/warp_raytrace/render_context.py	75.00%	3 Missing ⚠️
newton/_src/sim/builder.py	66.66%	2 Missing ⚠️
newton/_src/viewer/viewer_file.py	77.77%	2 Missing ⚠️
newton/_src/geometry/raycast.py	0.00%	1 Missing ⚠️

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