Hey folks
Wondering if there is anyway to access the standard unity terrain data using hengine?
Cheers
Nick

Not at this time. Unity terrains are not supported by the Engine plugin at the moment.

Thanks for the reply, That's a shame we are missing out on a lot of powerful functionally being able to access and modify terrain data, can we put an rfe forward for that please, if an rfe exists already an extra vote for higher priority :-)
Cheers
Nick

Yep, an RFE already exists. Will certainly add the vote to it.

terrains in houdini engine would be soooo soooo sooo soooo soooo wonderful!

another vote for unity terrains.

This is a limitation in UE4 as well but it is fairly easy to get a Houdini terrain into it by using a height map. I imagine you could do the same in Unity, maybe not…I usually limit my high res displacement to the Y axis, side project the UV's and render from the top down with an Ortho camera at 4k or 8k with a black and white gradient. You then have to scale the geo in Y to match the height, but I find that you can get this exact, I have done terrain, and matched geometry placement into a few engines this way with no problems.

Has the status of this changed at all? ( can Hengine work with Unity terrains now - 16.5 323 ?)

I made a simple tool to blow away any geo that is under a terrain, but sadly in Unity when I drop the Terrain into the specified slot in my HDA slot nothing happens - i would guess it is not recognizing it as geo. Is this user error on my part? should this work?

My hack at the moment is to embed an exported OBJ version of the terrain into the HDA, but that is not ideal as we have many levels and it is not dynamic if the terrain is edited.

I am going to try adding a convert_heightfeild node into the terrain input node chain just to see if that fixes things.

Also is there an ETA on when the Unity plugin will support the new 16/16.5 houdini terrains the like the Unreal ones does?

Thanks.

Currently the Unity plugin does not directly support Houdini heightfields as Unity terrain. As a workaround, use a convert_heightfield, which will then allow the plugin to bring it in as a regular mesh.

There is development currently being done to support heightfields directly. As for ETA, the best I could promise is sometime this year.

seelanv
Currently the Unity plugin does not directly support Houdini heightfields as Unity terrain. As a workaround, use a convert_heightfield, which will then allow the plugin to bring it in as a regular mesh.

There is development currently being done to support heightfields directly. As for ETA, the best I could promise is sometime this year.

Thanks thats great to hear.

I still have a question though, I guess I asked 3 above.

Can the Unity HEngine plugin work with Native Unity terrains? What I would like to do is be able to just drop the terrain prefab into my HDA within unity and work with it. I have not had luck so far.

So that would be sending height data upstream to Houdini from Unity. Currently not possible, but is part of future plans to add in.

A workaround (haven't tried it myself) would be to use the Export Raw functionality in Unity Terrain settings. You might be able to use that exported file as input (heighfield) for your HDA.

Another method would be write a script that can query the height values from the terrain data (https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/TerrainData.GetHeights.html) and somehow marshall into your HDA as a parameter input (as float array or file data). It can be a little tricky to get the size and coordinates to match up though.