I would like to know is there a way to export crowd simulation through game development toolset….i have tried alembic but alembic takes hell lot of time to import in unreal..…I have also tried FBX when I import it in unreal it comes as a static mesh there is no animation. Any lead or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Abhilash Vishwanath

Hi Abhilash,

If you want to export animated characters from Houdini (or any other DCC) they will most likely have to be built using a rig. (Game engines typically require bone based animation)

What you however could do is perhaps bake out your crowds using Vertex Animation Textures. This allows for per vertex animation, which might be a good solution for smaller crowds. If you need larger crowds I recommend looking into animated impostors.

Impostors - https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/game-tools-imposter-textures/?collection=53 [www.sidefx.com]
Vertex Animation Textures - https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/game-tools-vertex-animation-textures/?collection=50 [www.sidefx.com]

If you could describe what kind of crowds and how exact it needs to be, it will probably be a bit easier to find the right solution

Paul

Hi, it's been a while since this was posted but I just stumbled upon this thread.

A while ago I ended up exporting fairly large crowds (1000+ agents) from Houdini using Vertex Animation Textures similarly to what Paul was suggesting. I was also relying on Instanced Static Meshes on the Unreal Engine side. The approach proved to be quite successful. I don't go too much into detail but you can read a bit more about it towards the end of this post:
http://www.rubendiazhernandez.com/houdini-crowds-to-unreal-a-use-case [www.rubendiazhernandez.com]

Great writeup Rubs, very helpful.

Hello Rubs
You are mentioning exporting agents to fbx, how do you achieve that?

< 10: Hero o semi-hero, they could be exported as FBX or complex rigs.

anyone know how to export a point cloud of a crowd simulation

Since the individual agents are packed primitives by design, they all are represented by a single point in scene. If you don't unpack your crowdsim, it is a pointcloud already. Exporting this could easily be done through bgeo or alembic