hi, i'm a bit confused, double checked everything and seems valid, im using unreal material to assign materials in houdini, then putting HDA into unreal, and there is visible differnece inbetween shaders.

on the left its baked geometry, on the right is HDA,


even more strange behavior is when i hit bake, and then move baked geo to side the shader on HDA is as it suposse to be (but HDA icon is gone guess that means something)



and when i change any parameter on my HDA shader is gone wrong again

Hi,

That is expected, as the mesh with the Houdini icon is a Mesh Proxy (HoudiniStaticMesh) and not a Static Mesh.

Those proxies are a lot faster to generate than static mesh, but don't come with all the bells and whistles.
We use them when cooking temporary data, to provide faster feedback to users when playing with parameters.

We automatically refine them to native Static Meshes when baking, playing in editor, saving the level or on a timer (options are available in the details panel for that), or you can right click on the mesh, and choose refine.

thanks for answer,
from artist point of view its quite confusing, if its for performance then i understand this, but if its just to inform that its houdini mesh, icon would be more than enough.

on side note automatic refine on timer doesnt work when you have realtime turned off in viewport