Hi,

I've been playing a lot lately with the GameDev Toolset, mainly generating procedural game assets to be used in Unreal. So far here's some feedback:

- Vertex Animation Texture Node.
I got it to work once, with the object working perfect in Unreal. But the tool seems very picky. For example:
* I've attached a very simple scene, clicking render is not doing anything, no file is produced, there's no error message or any information that could help understand the issue
* I had an almost identical scene working fine minutes ago, but importing the generated fbx in unreal was giving me a completely broken mesh.
* I've give up on trying to render another simple scene because the node was constantly failing giving me the following error: “Cook error in RENDER_ORIENT”, I tried to look up the problematic node, but could not figure out the issue.

- RBD Fracture/Director/Solver
* Changing Houdini axis to Z-Up seems to mess up the tool, the gravity and the Ground Plane and now placed the wrong way
* Setting the frame to activate to 1 in the RBD Director will not work, it needs to be at least 2.

- RBD to FBX
* This one works great! only fail for some silly mistakes like forgetting to select the solver node.

If someone can help with the Vertex Texture Animation, thanks a lot!

Okay, after reopening the scene and re-rendering using the Vertex Animation texture node I noticed that it's actually doing the render super fast, but I was not looking at the right folder, I'm not getting this $HIP thingy in the file dialogs apparently it changed for some reason and the exported files are not at the same place…

Ok, now I can export the Vertex Texture Animation fine, but the results in Unreal are not as expected, there's an animation but it's broken and does look like the one that I had in Houdini.

Here's my workflow:

• Render the Vertex Texture Animation in Houdini, files are produced and I end up with the .fbx mesh and two .exr textures as expected
  
• Import those three assets in Unreal
  
• Create a new Material in Unreal and copy paste the Rigid Vertex Animation UE Code section from Houdini's VAT node
  
• Make sure that my material is not using tangent space normals, add the 3 custom UVs and connect all the needed materials input in UE
  
• Create a material instance, override the pos and rot textures, assign them to the imported .exr textures
  
• Override the Bounding box in the material instance and copy paste the values from Houdini's VAT node
  
• Assin the material instance to the imported mesh
  

What I've tried without success:
- I've tripple checked my settings, everything looks ok
- I've tried setting the material to use Full Precision UVs (read somewhere that this could help)
- Tried changing the texture compression (UE sees them as HDR which is not needed, but that's just to save space on the GPU I guess)

Any help appreciated!

Things to check.
When importing the mesh make sure to set vertex color import to Replace and turn off “Remove Degenerates”
Turn on full precision uv's in the details panel of the mesh. This is required.
For both textures set the compression setting to Vertex Displacement and filter to Nearest. This is also required.

Hi Mike,
I have a related question but let me know if you would prefer that I create a new post or if it is ok to do it over here.
I have a more complex destruction animation that I'm trying to import inside Unreal. But the animation is just a bit different from the one in Houdini.
Also the barriers at the top are quite different too, I'm wondering if it is because they have another material applied to them? but the ladder thing on the outside too.

I baked the houdini animation and saved it as bgeos out of my dop network and ran the VAT rop from that.
I followed the setting you mentioned above for both textures and models. But still have different results.

how do you handle complex destruction that involve multiple elements with different materials?


I can't really post a hip file as it is work related but here is a capture.
any suggestion would be greatly appreciated