Hello,

I have created an HDA of a terrain and some scattered points that contain primitives. Everything loads up nicely in UE4. I see the object scale variation created by the scatter node reflected in UE4. I also know about the ability to create additional instances using the Instanced Inputs in UE4 to create even more variation among the instances. But is it possible to control a single mesh/point in UE4? Or are these packed instances forever bound to each other? My goal is to get the general layout of all these scattered objects in Houdini…but then be able to nudge and fine tune the position and scale in UE4.

MrBrad (this is Doug from the Houdini Heightfield video you commented on last month). Since you haven't got a response here yet, you might want to try cross-posting to the HoudiniEngine for UE4 forum [www.sidefx.com]. Damien (dpernuit [www.sidefx.com] - SideFX's HoudiniEngine for UE4 maintainer) frequents that forum and is probably best equipped to answer this question.

The functionality that MrBrad is asking for is something you can do with UE4's built in foliage tool… you can mass scatter instanced objects and then tweak them after the fact. After switching to a Houdini foliage placement workflow, you lose this feature.

Actually, I wonder if the recently added “Bake to Foliage” will handle this? I haven't tried it but it sounds like it might work.

https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/62310/ [www.sidefx.com]

Thanks for following up Doug. I have since learned about UE4's native foliage system and it does indeed do what I was hoping to do with Houdini workflow. Placing by hand is not so bad for smaller scenes…and I have been using UE4 procedural foliage spawner for larger areas.

The Bake to Foliage sounds very promising. This could be a nice way to generate variations of a Houdini procedural asset within UE4.

And also good tip on the HoudiniEngine for UE4 forum. I will poke around there too.

Cheers!

MrBrad
The Bake to Foliage sounds very promising. This could be a nice way to generate variations of a Houdini procedural asset within UE4.
!

MrBrad, I did a video on the mechanics of using Houdini to create UE4 foliage.