Hi folks,

We're happy to announce the release of an updated Houdini Niagara data interface and supporting resources. This thread will provide access to files and updates. Subscribe to this post to receive future updates.

Check out this page for some videos describing the different parts of the plugin and the demo files [www.sidefx.com]. If you've subscribed to this thread you will receive updates when a new video is posted.

Make sure you have the latest daily build of SideFX Labs (for the Niagara ROP).

The examples hip files and content plugin can be found here. [drive.google.com]
To install the content plugin, create a new ue4 project and copy HoudiniNiagaraDemo2020 into the Plugins folder of your Unreal project.

4.25 plugin release [github.com]
To install the latest data interface plugin:

1. Copy the HoudiniNiagara folder from the github link into (Your Unreal Project)/Plugins folder.
   

You can confirm the latest plugin is installed by checking the plugin settings in Unreal.

For MacOS, the first time you open UE4 you need to ctrl-click the app icon and open in order to allow the plugin to load. Otherwise, you will receive an unsigned developer warning.

You can download and build from source here. [github.com]

If you have any questions, please reply below instead of starting a new thread.

Here are some examples of what the data interface can do.

Super cool! Ill be digging into this tomorrow after work.

Great presentation you and Paul had over at the InsideUnreal!

Hello everyone! The link in the first post has been updated to include more hip files and the content plugin for UE4. I set it up with the third person template but should work with others. Just add the maps in the content folder to an existing persistent level.

Mike

Hey Mike!!

Thank you very much for this holy grail of information!!!

This is great! So much to unpack and learn from. As an aside, the bridge demo doesn't seem to have matching content in the Unreal Project? (The hip file has the houdini network there.) Regardless, thanks again for putting together all of these examples, scenes and videos. That chain link one is crazy cool.

pete

Hey Mike.

Is this plugin compatible backwards say with UE version 4.23 ?

So if my engineers compile this for us, we don't open a huge can of compatibility worms…?

Thanks,

/Risto

Lead VFX Artist

Wargaming UK

Thanks so much for sharing your examples, and great work! Looking forward to diving in deeper.
Everything is working well on my system after following the instructions closely.

In case this helps other users, I missed the fact that the examples in UE4 are a content plugin. As stated, they must go in the ‘Plugins’ folder of one's UE4 project root. That solved an error I had initially.

For new UE4 users, the example levels may need to be toggled from “Change Streaming Method” –> “Blueprint” to “Always Loaded” to see them when playing the level.

Keep up the great work Mike!

ristopuukko
Is this plugin compatible backwards say with UE version 4.23 ?

Unfortunately, this is only compatible with 4.25 and beyond. There have been too many changes to Niagara for us to make this backward compatible.

Hi folks. There's now a separate page with walk-through videos (link in the first post) to help get you up and running. I'll be adding more videos in the next week or two.

Hi Mike, thanks for creating the Lab tools and this kind of workflow for Houdini and UE4. Really appreciate the efforts.

I was going through the news videos you posted. Everything is working fine except for the custom attribute thing. Whenever I am adding the custom attribute module to the Particle Update, it is throwing compile error. In the log, it is saying “Cannot access field ‘HOUDINI’ of structure” and “cannot assign value of type ‘float’ to type '': no implicit conversion allowed”.

Any idea why this is happening?

Hey Mike..

In regards to your comment about the Plugin for Preview 7 release crashing the production release. Now that 4.25 is officially available, do you have an ETA for to make that available?

I thought these tools might ship with 4.25, but it still appears to be reference v1.0 of the tools.

Thanks!

Michael

Mikal
Now that 4.25 is officially available, do you have an ETA for to make that available?

We're working on it at the moment. Just cleaning up a couple issues. Should have something available tomorrow.

For 4.25 the github repo will probably be the best place to grab the plugin.

Cheers Mate

A fan of the improvements… was previously using the v1.0 Tools and CSV exporter for particle position updates, am glad you came round to the idea . JSON seems much nicer as well - Those CSV files could get BIG.

Had some nice results so far with the new modules, and the update is very timely for the project we're on.

Thanks again

@Mikal: We've just published the 4.25 version of the plugin on github.

https://github.com/sideeffects/HoudiniNiagara/releases/tag/4.25 [github.com]

Are there any learning material/demo scenes for the creation of crowds using Houdini to Niagra?

I can't get the same result as the video.

The engine version is 4.25.

Is this a bug? Is it my mistake?

And there is a mysterious lock mark.

I think the mistake is that you're trying to set the houdini.particle.position instead of particle.position. Just below SampleSpawnedHoudiniPointCache.
Have you downloaded the content plugin in the first post of this thread?

Thank you for your reply.

Thank you for the appropriate point.

Yes, I downloaded the plugin here.


It went well

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Hi Mike, thanks for creating the Lab tools and this kind of workflow for Houdini and UE4. Really appreciate the efforts.

I was going through the news videos you posted. Everything is working fine except for the custom attribute thing. Whenever I am adding the custom attribute module to the Particle Update, it is throwing compile error. In the log, it is saying “Cannot access field ‘HOUDINI’ of structure” and “cannot assign value of type ‘float’ to type '': no implicit conversion allowed”.

Any idea why this is happening?

I had the same problem.