Skeletal Meshes & Animating 1: Unreal to Houdini and back

Welcome to this tutorial about exporting animations from and to Unreal and Houdini!

In this tutorial we are exporting a character from Unreal, containing a skeletal mesh and bones. From there we jump into Houdini, quickly create a waving animation, and export that animation back into unreal to add it to our animation library!

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CREATED BY

Ivo van Roij
IVO VAN ROIJ

As the original founder of Dokai, Ivo is passionate about using Houdini to create procedural content for cinematics and videogames, and is currently working as a Technical Artist on the new Gran Turismo games for Polyphony Digital at SONY Interactive Entertainment with the focus on Environmental design. He graduated from IGAD (International Games Architecture & Design) in Breda with 3 years of experience with Houdini, and loves environmental design. He also interned at SideFX Software‘s game dev team in 2018/2019.He grew up in Tilburg, The Netherlands, is an avid martial artist, and wants to help you with his knowledge and share his experience from the industry through tutorials and seminars!

More from Ivo van Roij

COMMENTS

  • pineapsys 5 years, 8 months ago  | 

    this is basic i understand right staring off in the video so i made the curve node but do you click a button to actually start drawing one or or am i missing something?

  • pineapsys 5 years, 8 months ago  | 

    ok nvm idk why but now is working and i shall be continuing to check this method thank you for the share

  • akiocha 5 years, 8 months ago  | 

    Hands down one of the best houdini tutorials I've looked at. It teaches so much more than just pipes. Amazingly efficient/clean workflow makes it really easy to follow. And I learnt a lot about building up nodes "based on" other parameters. Overall, it's a great crash course for a start to end of creating an asset. Thanks for uploading! This was really helpful!

    • Ivo van Roij 5 years, 8 months ago  | 

      Hi Akiocha!

      Thanks for the kind words. At Dokai we try to make tutorials accessible to everyone, but still going in-depth of how things work. Hope you learned something, and make sure to keep checking out our tutorials for the next parts!

      Cheers, Ivo

  • OmarWanis 5 years, 8 months ago  | 

    This started off really well, Part 1 was detailed and well-paced, Part 2 started well until the UVs part which i absolutely understood nothing of. I had no idea why you did what you did, nothing was showing off on the viewport since you never used a uv quick shade node at any step, i had no idea why you created a point and added a vertex and that -90 angle and the arclength and the converting, you weren't explaining where this was going, just narrating each step and finally we have a solved problem that i didn't know what it was in the beginning.

    Hope Part 3 is as detailed as Part 1.

    Thanks for the effort, cheers!

    • Ivo van Roij 5 years, 8 months ago  | 

      Hi Omar!

      Thanks for watching the tutorials. As a student, I'm doing my best, but sometimes I might skip things as it goes. We create the points and basically open up the closed line (because when we create it, it doesn't have a start or end point) and then we create an extra point at that start so we have a similar point in space, but 2 points to give UV coordinates to. The arclength is used to get the dimensions across one axis. However, since we want a U and a V coordinate (and not just 2 times a U or 2 times a V coordinate) we need to rotate the cross section so we can scale accordingly. I'll go a little bit more indepth with the UVs in this setup in part 3 (or 4) and show how you can use another multiplier in the HDA parameter interface to corrospond with the UV's scale when creating them.

      Thanks for the awesome and honest feedback, and thanks for watching!

      Cheers, Ivo

    • ujerjozwik 5 years, 8 months ago  | 

      hi, in Ivo's scene file from his website link for this tutorial i found the missing piece lost in the edit. in the pipe subnet flip the sweep node from "All Primitives at Each Point" to "One Primitive at a Time. after this, the steps taken to create the uvs works correctly.

  • montana2008 5 years, 8 months ago  | 

    Could you do a tutorial on how to piece together exsiting fbx modular assets which can then be generated by a curve or whatever inside unreal 4? There isnt much stuff around on how to use ready made game assets such as ones made in other DCC packages but put together in houdini etc

    • Ivo van Roij 5 years, 8 months ago  | 

      Hi Montana,

      That is definitely usefull, but currently we at Dokai are mostly working on generating everything from the start. I'm thinking of doing something similar though, using modular assets from i.e.: Maya or Max and have those then connect to eachother in Houdini. We might show something using modular assets later on in our other series!

      Cheers, Ivo

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