What is the way of exporting models from Houdini to Unreal 4?

Seems like the FBX exporter in Houdini is not working well.. or lack compatibility with unreal 4 and not offer enough exporting features .

What issues are you running into?
I was successful porting models and materials using fbx 2013 and making sure there's no overlapping uvs.

Hi,
thanks for the reply,
“No smoothing group information was found in this FBX scene”
did you try import into unreal 4.7 and up using fbx 2014 ?
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Content/FBX/index.html [docs.unrealengine.com]

seems that houdini doesent export smoothing groups, but you can tell unreal to calculate normals.

i was having issues with importing fbx skinned characters from houdini to unreal… at first the skinned character when i moved a joint became a mess (the character deformed fine in houdini), after trying many diferent things i found that if you append a capture distance sop before your capture sop, everything works fine, before adding the capture distance sop there were a lot of vertices weighting -1

I'm getting the same with UE 4.7 exporting from H14.

Setting normals with Normals or Facet SOPs has no effect … I'm guessing Smoothing Groups is a hold-out from 3DS Max, and needs to be written to/set in addition to vert normals in the FBX exporter. It's not that big a deal anyway if you're normal mapping, although I'm trying to get normals from Substance Designer to work properly in it, but I guess that's another story. (edit: so TC_Normalmap needs setting manually in texture compression for pre-cooked normal maps).

UE4's unit size is a jarring weird too. I was getting tangent warnings from my FBX geo until I set a x10 uniform scale to my exports (which were ~1 unit volume in Houdini). Adventures, adventures.

Hope it will change soon…
Exporting to game engine should be trivial in any 3D environment…

Make sure your model has UVs.
Create point normals.
Use attribute promote SOP to promote point normals to vertex attributes.

Using Houdini Indie 14, Unreal 4.7.3, Export settings Maya Compatible using FBX201400. Seems to work fine. I can mix and match smooth and faceted normals on a mesh, it renders correctly in Unreal and there are no import errors.

Hi thanks alot for the reply,
OK,the vertex promote did most of the trick,
still
as it seems, I cant get quads geometry …
it triangulate all faces…

What do you mean you can't get quads?

For what it's worth, I've not bothered to look to much into Unreal's rendering pipeline, but every game engine I've ever worked with compresses vertex data and stores/renders model geometry as triangles. It's how the hardware operates. I assume Unreal does the same. It used to be graphics hardware preferred triangle fans and triangle strips for performance because subsequent triangles in a strip or fan could be defined with a single vertex, but that concern seems to have gone by the wayside as hardware has improved. You should be able to send ngons through the exporter, but everything ends up as triangles.

You should also assume your geometry is being split on UV atlases and hard edges as well in the game engine even though you have a solid piece of geometry on export.

Is there a reason you need quads in the engine?

Hi,
thank you,its seems you very right.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Content/FBX/StaticMeshes/index.html [docs.unrealengine.com]

I`m used ro TouchDesigner which is also 3d engine to do
operations on geometry like in Houdini so I looked for quads option,but i guess Unreal works differently.

I notice this string is now 2 years old when the package was coming out I am interested in where we are now? I wish to start setting up a work flow the game cinematics using MAYA Unreal4 and Houdini . I am trying to assess Houdini as a bridge to transfer the assets to and from and I asking if you know how and if this is time effective as a workflow?

We are in very good shape. If you have more specific questions I can maybe help. exporting with FBX from Houdini 16 using Maya2016 compatibility to Unreal 4.16.x is working fine for me. There are a lot of little things to be aware of such as unit conversion, the difference in orientation, and moving various attributes to the vertex level as stated earlier in this thread to prevent import errors. It's easy enough to put together little digital assets in Houdini that you can append to your models to handle the repetitive house keeping tasks for export.

Houdini Engine is awesome particularly for Level/set design, but I feel like it's only worth while when you achieve a threshold of complexity with the team and project. I have not been using it recently.

As to whether Houdini is time efficient, that depends on the artist/animator. I think it's much easier to manage all the asset data in Houdini for export, because it's easier to see than in Maya or Max, but there's a higher technical IQ tax to pay. Just sorting through the various attribute SOPs to figure out how to get a model set up for export can be daunting for someone who isn't well versed in Houdini or game technology in general.

I haven't run into issues with rigged animation but I have been doing some lightweight animation. There are definitely limitations on what you can get into Unreal especially dependent on the target platform, but those limitations exist in Maya and Max as well; complex curve functions, bone limits, bones per vertex, various rigging tools, a lot of things to consider. I haven't tried to export blend shapes in a long time but I know I had them working in the past.

There is quite a lot of flexibility setting up a pipeline to go from Houdini to Unreal. I would have no issue using Houdini exclusively for cinematics in Unreal but I have no idea what your requirements are. The only way to know is start testing. I can probably help along the way if you have questions.

Thanks for the update @MichaelC; it's good to hear.