anybody have any thoughts on how I might could bake out a 2d top view image for my procedural level to use as a minimap from within Unity?

Is that a thing you can do? Is there any rop or cop support?

I dont know about rops, but I know that cops should work inside Unity Houdini Engine. You could then look at geokey and geometry cop nodes.

I suspect that rops also work and would give you better results faster.

hmm, ok i will check out those nodes. I guess I can just experiment and see what I can come up with.

I'm starting with a city base from openstreetmap.org, so i guess an alternative method would be to just download the section of the city I am using as a vector graphics format and build the overhead map from that (by flattening it to a raster format). that might be the easiest way…

Pretty sure you can import vector graphics directly into Houdini.

I know in the maya plug in, rops and cops are both easily supported to trigger renders and such from the host application. In maya, there is a small catch that, if you are not outputting geometry, you do have do to a force sync to trigger the render