Francis Chau

So my plan obviously is to make pinball flippers using Houdini later to be exported to Unreal Engine 4.

How I plan to do this are as follows (consider this a road map towards building a flipper):

Fundamental approach

1. Create two cylinders (One big and one small).
   
2. Create a rectangular box and taper it to bridge between the cylinders.
   
3. Boolean union with the 3 meshes.
   
4. Create a copy of it; and scale/extrude proportionally from the sides by a couple of centimeters (for collision geometry).
   
5. Create another copy of the copy; scale the y-axis on both top and bottom ends; and position that copy within the height of the flipper; the copy of the copy is the rubber portion of the flipper.
   

Procedural approach

1. Adjustable radius/diameter of the two cylinders; the size of the corresponding faces of the rectangular box is dependent on those cylinders.
   
2. Adjustable length of the flipper; rubber and collision are dependent on it.
   
3. Adjustable height of the flipper; collision is dependent on it.
   
4. Adjustable height and thickness of the flipper rubber; collision geometry thickness is dependent on the thickness of the rubber.
   
5. Adjustable number of segments for the big and small cylinders; both cylinders are independent.
   

Think that wraps up my roadmap in a nutshell; notice I did not include high poly version for baking as well as uv unwrapping; these come later.