Alexander Vasilev

Hi all. I'm trying to use the Houdini Niagara rop to bring an RBD simulation to Unreal and struggling in transferring the correct orientation for the pieces. Did anyone manage to achieve this?
I managed to create the correct orient attribute in Houdini, but how do I feed it to Niagara? What module should use this attribute? I tried “orient mesh to vector” with overriding the quaternion, but it gives the wrong orientation whatever I do.

edit - I found a solution - I had to generate a fake N from orient inside Houdini and export both orient and N, then I used this normal as Look at the direction in “orient mesh to vector” module + orient as quaternion override + N as reference axis vector + 1 override incoming orientation. This feels like an overly complex answer to a simple rotation question.

But I have new questions:
1 - Niagara side - When I try to convert emitter to GPU sim, I get an “invalid type for index in NiagaraEmitterInstance.ush”. Is it even possible to use GPU?
2 - Houdini side - After the first frame I have a weird position offset on each piece. I think it could be some pivot offset, but why it's only starting on frame 2? I mean It looks ok in sim right after RBD but if I delete geometry and instance exported pieces on rbd points, this offset appears.

Yay! Thank you very much!

Hi Forum,

I am not sure this is the right place to adress this thing, but it looks like the Vertex Animation Tool is not working in Houdini 17. When trying to bake a textere an error in RENDER_POSITION node stops the process:

Python error: Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 5, in
File “DProgram Files/Side Effects Software/Houdini 17.0.352/houdini/python2.7libs\hou.py”, line 19438, in getPixelByUV
return _hou.CopNode_getPixelByUV(*args, **kwargs)
OperationFailed: The attempted operation failed.
Could not open the COP node

Checked this in a fresh setup as well as in the old projects where I baked without any problems. Can someone please check and confirm that this is not only my PC issue?