Michael C

I have never seen L-Systems required for a position, but I have used them in production. It's a handy tool to have in your box. If you know how to use them you will see opportunities to use them.

We are in very good shape. If you have more specific questions I can maybe help. exporting with FBX from Houdini 16 using Maya2016 compatibility to Unreal 4.16.x is working fine for me. There are a lot of little things to be aware of such as unit conversion, the difference in orientation, and moving various attributes to the vertex level as stated earlier in this thread to prevent import errors. It's easy enough to put together little digital assets in Houdini that you can append to your models to handle the repetitive house keeping tasks for export.

Houdini Engine is awesome particularly for Level/set design, but I feel like it's only worth while when you achieve a threshold of complexity with the team and project. I have not been using it recently.

As to whether Houdini is time efficient, that depends on the artist/animator. I think it's much easier to manage all the asset data in Houdini for export, because it's easier to see than in Maya or Max, but there's a higher technical IQ tax to pay. Just sorting through the various attribute SOPs to figure out how to get a model set up for export can be daunting for someone who isn't well versed in Houdini or game technology in general.

I haven't run into issues with rigged animation but I have been doing some lightweight animation. There are definitely limitations on what you can get into Unreal especially dependent on the target platform, but those limitations exist in Maya and Max as well; complex curve functions, bone limits, bones per vertex, various rigging tools, a lot of things to consider. I haven't tried to export blend shapes in a long time but I know I had them working in the past.

There is quite a lot of flexibility setting up a pipeline to go from Houdini to Unreal. I would have no issue using Houdini exclusively for cinematics in Unreal but I have no idea what your requirements are. The only way to know is start testing. I can probably help along the way if you have questions.

If you go to downloads->Daily Builds, it looks like there are 32 bit builds of 12.5 for linux available.