I am wondering if it is possible to have a texture or at least supply a path to one in an HDA for Houdini to use. Specifically I am hoping to use the Quixel Bridge integration within UE5 to source leaf atlases for a tree generator. Out of the box there seems to be no easy way to do this, I have tried using a "File- image" param without success.

Do you want to access textures that exist as uassets inside UE? Or do they exist as pngs/tgas/etc outside of Unreal Engine? Because if you want to access textures from the content browser or something in UE I don't think that is possible, as they've been converted to uassets and are no longer regular textures (I believe).

Either/or. I had guessed that uassets would be a no go, so even just the ability to input a file path that points to a png/tga would suffice. I have tried this using an image file param with no success, so I'm wondering if I'm just not using the right parameter or method?

Figured it out! I had simply forgot to change the default "Browse Mode" on my file param to be Read Only.

Wondering if anyone has figured out how to do this without manually adding the filename of the image to a param.

When I send geo straight through with no processing, the texture comes back in the output..so it has to be in there somewhere. Right?

Thus far all of the unreal material parameters I've tried are unfortunately either strings that only point to Uasset files in the content browser, or float vectors that contain nothing.

I am working with a lot of textures that have no corresponding file on the hd at the moment so manually assigning a file using a file-image param is super time consuming and far from the ideal workflow.