CONVERTING ALPHA CARDS TO OPAQUE GEOMETRY

In this tutorial I'll be showing a quick yet efficient method of converting a 3D asset using alpha cards into fully opaque geometry. I'll be showing you how to use the Houdini Trace node in order to generate the geometry, and then some vex snippets to copy it into your original model's geometry space. As well, I'll go over some optimizations we can make to the network to speed up the iteration time and allow it to be more flexible!

This can be a big advantage when generating foliage assets in Unreal 5 that use Nanite. Since the masked rendering modes incur a significant performance cost due to nanite overdraw, you may find it to be much more performant to use fully opaque geometry on it instead.