The list is amazing! I'm excited for it. Keep it up.

Hi everyone,

Well, I have some great news for those of you who have been eager to test v2.

With the Houdini Game jam at the end of the week, we've decided to make the Alpha version of the plugin public.
It can be accessed on the github repo:
https://github.com/sideeffects/HoudiniEngineForUnreal-v2 [github.com]

Source code is available for UE4.23/24/25 and the master branch of unreal (4.26).
Pre-built binaries for UE4.24 and 4.25 can be downloaded on the release page:
https://github.com/sideeffects/HoudiniEngineForUnreal-v2/releases [github.com]

Currently, Alpha3.1 is linked with the latest Houdini 18.0 production build, H18.0.532.

Some more details on the current Alpha can be found in Paul's post in the forum [www.sidefx.com] as well

@FFD/FDX3245: We do have specific milestones set for the beta, and can't really ignore them for the game jam.
That being said, we don't have issues giving access to the alpha for the game jam…

@lealexandrebreton: No, it actually means quite the opposite actually.
In v1 the runtime part of the plugin contained a lot of the cooking and processing part, despite most of it being editor-only.
In v2, all of that logic is gone from the runtime module, which makes the runtime part of the plugin a lot lighter, but we still do not support editing HDA parameters or inputs at “game time”.

Great work on V2 and all the added features.

I read Blueprint functionality being mentioned in previous posts.

Will there be an Update Blueprint Feature? Similar to how Unity has the Update Prefab option? At the moment we have set Blueprints that we would like to keep reusing in our pipeline. Is this an option already?

Thanks for improving the curve funcitonality. Will the curves be expanded more to allow for Raycasting to terrain? Especially when placing roads along the terrain, having the ability to raycast and fill in the terrain below the mesh would be a great option.

A great to have but not necessarily needed, is the option to have tangents on the curve. Similar to how Spline Component in Unreal has the Tangents along the points.

Is there any plan to support menu-script parameters?
I quite use them a lot in my digital assets..

I've been experiencing a lot of Houdini Engine sessions crashing/disconnecting. For example I followed a tutorial to create a simple pipe tool, and if I drop this HDA in my map with the Alpha 3.2 plugin it cooks and appears, but as soon as I attempt to move the curve my session disconnects with this message in Unreal:


Attempting to restart the session with this HDA in the level will fail again every time. I have to delete all instances and even then restarting the session fails at least once with this message:


The next restart after that seems to work, but I can still never actually move any of the curve points without it crashing my session.

I've attached the HDA in question. All I'm doing is dropping it in the ThirdPersonExampleMap in a fresh ThirdPerson project on 4.25.

The same HDA works fine in v1.

Hi!
I have not used v1 or Houdini a lot but its nice to get some hands on with v2.

We have a bit of a problem where we have a base landscape for artists to sculpt. Currently its just one big one but I would like to split it up to world components. (So they can work on different areas.) However when I try to reference the landscape I only get a empty landscape into Houdini and if I reference one of the proxy tiles I only get that one tile. I have not found any way to get more than one tile in at a time.

Is there a way to reference the landscape including all the landscape proxys or some other way to do this?

A lot of cool stuff coming in V2 that I've been struggling with in V1. As every day HE user I thank you for that!

My favourite is: - Instancers can now have a position offset per instance override variation.

Would it be possible to have more custom per-instance variation attributes?
The most important ones would be “Weight” and material override but also other UProperties and Houdini attributes could be useful like Visibility to switch instances layers on/off or to create custom per-instance behaviours inside of HDA similar to Weight property like scale variation for example.

The other issues with Instanced Inputs I have are that they often lose references due to the list being unordered and references are remembered by index in UE4. Meaning if I change something in Houdini or just change parameters and the order or quantity of Instanced Inputs changes the references are lost or incorrect. It would be great to have references stored by Name or ID and the list being ordered by name as well or some kind of unreal_instance_sort_priority attribute.

The last awesome feature would be Houdini Instanced Inputs and Houdini Parameters presets (or defaults) inside of UE4 as part of HoudiniAsset. I really like creating instances with recommended Packed Primitives workflow as it makes it easy to work within Houdini as far as you can see the proxy instances instead of points comparing to unreal_instance attribute workflow. But unlike unreal_instance attribute workflow, there is no way to set a reference to UE4 static mesh to apply by default and adding unreal_instance attribute to the packed geo does nothing. Anyway rather than hardcoding UE4 references to materials and meshes inside of HDA that can be quite generic and useful across multiple projects. I would rather have a list of presets (or at least one preset per HoudiniAsset) for both (properties and instances) inside of HoudiniAsset that can be set up for different use cases. Simply put having default Parameters and Inputs here would be superb.


Thank you for the awesome plugin and hopefully we will see some of this implemented in v2!

Did anyone play around with the new World Composition support? I'm not sure where to find some documentation.

Thanks,
Chris

I've been following the PDG for Indie Gamedev [www.sidefx.com] course to test this plugin and the PDG Asset Link (replacing the Unity parts with Unreal, since it is a Unity-based course), however at some point it gets to painting attributes directly onto a grid inside of Unity using Houdini Engine:



Is there an Unreal equivalent in this plugin? Or are we supposed to use the Unreal Mesh Painting tools to do this? If the Mesh Painting tools are to be used for this, how do we pick which attribute to paint?

Is V2 support vertex painting in UE4?

Hey Everybody,

I hope somebody can help me. I`m using V2 of the Houdini plugin for Unreal. I'm looking for a way to set an exposed parameter on my hda via blueprints. It's a level generator and I want the seed to be randomized at each start of the level. I`ve read through this thread but I´m still not sure if this is possible or not.

Any help is highly appreciated!
Cheers
CYTE

Hi CYTE,

Did you try to use to set float parameter on your HDA?

Hey hektor,

thanks for your help. No, I didn`t try that as I heard from someone else that what I want to do is not possible with the current Houdini Engine inside Unreal. It only gets evaluated in Editor but not at runtime of the game. But I will give this a try anyway.

Cheers
CYTE

Hi CYTE, Yes it's doesn't work at runtime. I'm not sure if that will be available in the future, it's bringing licensing issues.

Anyway… You need to do part of a level generation in Unreal. Depends on your level design, you can generate some modules from Houdini earlier and bake it. Like rooms and etc. But then you will need to put things together in Unreal. If you break it down you can generate quite a big amount of level layouts from Houdini and you can randomly choose between them.

Cheers,
Kamil

i want to mix heightfield tiles and instancer to sub_level, like this Wiki used attribute(“unreal_level_path”, “tile”, “unreal_split_attr”)；

but the actor only generated to main_Level.







where wrong with me. so sad ! need help

Hey guys, do you know whether the new UE4 plugin will support attribute painting like the Unity one does?

I was finally able to build UE4 4.26 from source today with the Houdini 18.0 Plugin master branch from the GitHub. However I was hoping to then copy paste the now compiled HoudiniEngine folder out of my GitHub engine install and into my 4.26 preview 7 install but that didn't seem to work. Is there anyway to compile the houdini plugin in for use with the current 4.26 preview 7 build that we can access in the Epic launcher or can we only use it with 4.26 by building from source? I'm a bit new to all of this so sorry if these are n00b questions!

I second the question eramos10 asks, is there a way to use this in 4.26 or do we have to wait for the final release?

One thing I am immediately noticing in the beta is that Undo doesn't seem to work with the session sync running. Is there a setting for this?