Hi everyone,

We'd like to hear your thoughts on how we can improve the Houdini Engine plugin for your Unity projects. Specifically, we're interested in 2 areas: improving workflow, and new features.

In terms of workflow, do you have some ideas and/or suggestions on making it easier to use the plugin? Our goal is to make using the plugin as seamless and painless as possible. It might also help if you can describe your current workflow. For example, once you bake out to a prefab from an HDA, then instantiate the prefab as instances in a level, how do you go about updating those instances again after making changes to the original HDA in Houdini?

What are the current features that you use but would like to see improvements?

For new features, what are the new functionality you like to see? Are there other plugins or tools that you use that you wish was built-into our plugin?

It would be great if you can also add some additional information such as development OS, target platforms, etc.

Our goal is to improve the plugin such that it is a highly effective tool for your projects and saves your team time.

Thanks.

If Unity can identify a HeightField, it's pretty good.

Documentation please, like the Unreal plugin. There appears to be much activity in the Unreal plugin github and I would like to see both game engines treated equally with similar features.

I would also like to see more examples of how to use the plugins to do different things. Feature-wise, I am pretty happy with it.

Documentation and feature matching with the Unreal plugin are definitely part of our near future plans. I also wholeheartedly agree on seeing more examples of how to use the plugin. Keep an eye out for these changes soon. Thank you for your suggestions.

“In terms of workflow, do you have some ideas and/or suggestions on making it easier to use the plugin? Our goal is to make using the plugin as seamless and painless as possible?”

Yes, the workflow is exactly what I am working thru now and I must say going from Houdini to Unity is pretty rough. I'm making some digital assets and at least have them nicely organized (like how cool the parameter interface is). Now bring it in to Unity and the interface looks great. “Now what the heck is all this mess?” so I tried for 4 days to learn and test and try tricks to organize the hierarchy a bit - NO GO!

I want to have the ability to make folders/sub-folders with the things I want.

Take for instance the curve decorator. You want to instantiate 7 cubes you would think you would have a folder 7 cubes, not a folder and sub-folder let alone the curve folders and game objects. For 7 cubes I see here(attached image) over 27 game objects…hmm. So spending days trying to organize that side of things I think it was in order that I drop my suggestion.

Respectfully,
Bryan Meadows

Hi Bryan,

Thanks for your feedback. I do agree that the current architecture of the created GameObjects for a HDA in Unity is not ideal, nor optimal for performance. Addressing that is one of the main features that we are working on currently. The future version will produce very light-weight GameObjects, with a nearly flat hierarchy. The resulting number of GameObjects will corresponding to what is actually needed in Unity.

So please be patient and keep providing us with feedback. We are listening and improving it.

Minor feedback request for Houdini Engine Unity, in `HEU_HoudiniAsset.cs` there's a private field for the AssetCookStatus that could be readable from external scripts: