Hi Friends,

I have a SDF volume simulation that I did in houdini and I converted it to a polygonal mesh to be exported outside of Houdini. I created an alembic cache of the whole 600 frame animation of this mesh, and imported that alembic geometry cache file in unreal engine.

The animation is playing well in unreal, but there are weird shadow artifacts from the bad topology on the mesh, and it looks really ugly up close. Is there any way to fix these artifacts and give the whole mesh a smooth looK? I m sure its a normals issue but I dont know how to fix it.

P.s: I tried smoothing the normals in houdini and reexporting but it also failed to fix the problem. Is there any way I could fix this problem directly in unreal or in Houdini??

Thanks in advance.

You could try computing the normal from the sdf gradient, it might be smoother.

for example, in a pointvop use a volumegradient node to sample the gradient from a second input with the sdf volume connected. Export the normalized gradient as 'N' in the vop.