MrBrad

I managed to do this by exporting an Alembic file from Houdini…and then importing Alembic into UE4 using a Geometry Cache input setting. So fun!

This video helped me understand why Alembic is so powerful and perfect for this kind of mesh deformation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDHxxk0y2D4 [www.youtube.com]

Is it reasonable to create a procedural mesh like this growing tree generated by an LSystem into UE4? I believe HDA's are for baking static meshes in the editor. So would I use FBX/Alembic animation? Or will that be impossible to texture/UV nicely anyway?

Just looking for some basic direction or if I should abort this mission and try something more realistic.

Thanks

Thanks for following up Doug. I have since learned about UE4's native foliage system and it does indeed do what I was hoping to do with Houdini workflow. Placing by hand is not so bad for smaller scenes…and I have been using UE4 procedural foliage spawner for larger areas.

The Bake to Foliage sounds very promising. This could be a nice way to generate variations of a Houdini procedural asset within UE4.

And also good tip on the HoudiniEngine for UE4 forum. I will poke around there too.

Cheers!