Aaron Carter

You'll have to look for the most recent branches and check what daily build is indicated by the naming convention, FYI, forgot to mention this ... I'll merge/squish it down to the original `Houdini20` branch when I'm satisfied it's in good shape and ready.

The title pretty much explains what I am doing here ... I've forked the plugin and begun work on refactoring this thing, improving efficiency/performance and trying to resolve any bugs/issues I can find. I am very serious about building an ambitious game and I simply must have this plugin in tip-top shape, integrated with the latest Unity tech and following our proper, modern C# (at least as modern as Unity allows lol) standards and practices. I thought about this for a while, and I can either sit back and wait for someone else to get around to it or I can just start doing it ... I just don't know if SideFx has .NET/C#/Unity expertise under the roof and even if they do if those people can afford to spend time on this plugin ... much less how much of a priority it is for them or other users ... too many unanswerable questions, inestimable timelines, etc for me to sit and wait with crossed fingers, and I really need to get some stuff done!

The fork can be found here:
https://github.com/atcarter714/HoudiniEngineForUnity/ [github.com]

I encourage folks to try/test it out and please report bugs/issues with as much error-related information as possible (stack traces, error messages/logs, explanation of what you did, etc). I will need these clues to help get this thing whipped into shape! It's a very big plugin by most standards, difficult and time-consuming to debug and test ... and my "domestic situation" makes it difficult to do anything (single father with no help, no sitters, straight 24/7 duty, lol). And please keep in mind these are really new/experimental changes being made and you cannot rely on anything being "perfect" at the moment ... I'm literally bobbing and weaving daily builds and having to use some fancy dev-ops to keep it together. However, I am quite serious about it, and this sort of stuff happens to be right up my alley (e.g., low-level programming, interop, plugins/integrations, D3D, engines, etc) ... so, I may not be able to make specific predictions on when certain will be ready, but I can assure you I will make this thing better than I found it. Something major I'm looking at doing here is integration with ECS/Entities workflows and other new Unity tech, and lots of other, smaller features like proper OpenVDB volume support (already have basic version working) ... and I'm already had some good results in personal tests with creating entity data in Houdini and injecting it into Unity.

If there's anyone from SideFx who's in charge of this plugin/Unity-related stuff or is at least familiar with it then I'd really love to get in touch and have someone to bounce ideas/questions off of, as there's just a lot of stuff in there which I am not sure what the intention/reasoning behind it was. This first pass, I'm trying not to change the functionality/intent of the code so much as just update/clean it up to 2024 C#/Unity 6 standards, however I will be making some minor modifications to things where it makes sense. Thus far, I'm getting pretty good results/experience out of this fork with the improvements made thus far, and don't think I've broken anything lol

Regards,
Aaron

P.S. -- If you have questions, experience errors/bugs (yes, there will be some!), etc please let me know.

This is probably what's causing my tree scattering hell in Unity 6 with the latest plugin ... I have done so much hunting and research and troubleshooting I forgot about this post. But now Jetbrains Rider is broken and won't find the "GenerateTerrainBuffers" function. What file is this in?

EDIT:
I found the method in question and made the suggested changes, but it still doesn't work. I added some log statements to try to get some info/feedback, but nothing ever shows in the console. Then I enabled the debugger and set breakpoints ... it never gets called. I tried experimenting with input nodes and heightfields and had all sorts of crazy bugs, like the scene view camera getting deleted and scene tab popping up in another window but not working and throwing 1,000 exceptions, or the input node's input fields disappearing ... there's apparently a lot of bad stuff happening ...