I saw there are many bdf file, does any one know what it is?
To be fair I am still figuring out what to do in order to avoid any errors from city processor node in Houdini, what I did was simply exporting data from small city hip file that comes with CitySample, and with new geo a PCB files generated I was able to run rule processor and get city same as small city. That being said, I believe there are so many tiny kinks not mentioned in the docs, nor anywhere about how to setup houdini graph, which is the key to have proper results. I’ll report back once I get it to work. Getting past Houdini Engine plugin crash and errors now onto next issues.
For crying out loud, now I used to get these without much errors and the city got built inside houdini, once I solved the issue with import/export I simply cannot get past this error in city processor
Error
Invalid source /obj/geo1/processor1/LOTS/foreach_end43
Error: Failure to cook template geometry…
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Best suggestion I can give to us, is to wait few weeks 
As one of key points of GDC 2022 is “New Tools for Building Photoreal Worlds in Unreal Engine 5.2” and “Procedural Content Generation in UE5”
It gives hopes that 5.2 will give us tools to scrap out this Houdini nightmare and save our mental health
So after dozens of hours spent with this I can finally say I made it work. I need to mention though that the whole process of importing stuff and just letting software run took about 50 hours, that’s including the HLODs build which took the most with my CPU (30 hours), imporintg exported geometry and the rest is few hours, with houdini baking stuff another few. No wonder Epic used $10k CPU to run those 53 builds of the city.
As for the setup in engine, the docs are just a guidelines, me working on 5.1 City Sample I had to just look up either small or big city maps for traffic, crowds setup since not everything grabs references from the get go. In the end, everything works fine and runs pretty well with 3070.
My map is 6km x 2km, I do have some missing roofs with medium sized buildings, but I assume it’s on the houdinis end. What I noticed is that you HAVE to be very precise and follow unwritten/unmentioned rules when setting up your city layout, zones and main arteries. Going crazy with this will end up with either breaking houdinis nodes or breaking in engine, or even not importing at all. Also it seems that some buildings get light leaks, which is due to having only one sided faces, but that might be due to me messing with plugins settings in order for that to not make the imports crash.
Here’s houdini top view of my sample
Here’s a 10 min video of me messing around the city: Taxi Manhattan - YouTube
I’m not gonna post a screenshot of the whole map loaded since it kills the framerate in engine, got one though:
So if anyone is still struggling and need some pointers then I’ll try to share a step by step guide of my setup.
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I’m glad to hear it worked out for you!
I’m very interested in what roofs are like in your city? In all the cities I was able to make, none of the buildings with non-rectangular roof shapes had a roof. And in my cities, at least half of the buildings were non-rectangular.
How about in your case?
I gave up. Running Rule Processors in Unreal crashes most of the time.
you did not enter city name in houdini’s city layout node. or the name doesn’t match the folder you created to put the pbc and geo
does any one fix the roof problem?
I am too getting the error, did you figure out the way to solve it? It seems I can generate the small city demo correctly. However if I create a new one from scratch even if it just include simpliest staight lines some errors are still gonna show up.
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i test houdini 18.5 19.5
all had error
to fix this you must find node
Error
Invalid source /obj/geo1/processor1/LOTS/BGEO_DATA_WRANGLING/file3
Error: Unable to read file “path/MyCity/houdini/otls/BGEO_Data/BDF_Data.bgeo”.
GeometryIO[hjson]: Unable to open file ‘path/MyCity/houdini/otls/BGEO_Data/BDF_Data.bgeo’
GeometryIO[hclassic]: Unable to open file ‘/path/T3/MyCity/houdini/otls/BGEO_Data/BDF_Data.bgeo’.
change BDF_Data.bgeo path
every is ok
forget my english
hope useful
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When I run RuleProcessor_Freeway, I keep getting an error
Fatal error: [File:D:\build++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\CoreUObject\Private\UObject\UObjectGlobals.cpp] [Line: 920] Attempted to create a package with name containing double slashes. PackageName: /Game/City//GEOMETRY/SM_Freeway_deck_collision_00_30
If I run the processor without decals, visible road geometry and collisions, the barriers and retaining pillars are created without any problems.
Does anyone know how to fix this and load road geometry and decals?
you do not add city name in city layout node
If the crash is caused by memory access violation, then it is often caused by the Houdini plugin for UE. Make sure that the versions of Houdini and the plugin match and also just try reinstalling the plugin.
I don’t use the city layout node because I only need the freeway.
Is it possible to add a city name attribute somewhere?
I found a solution. In the versioning node, I needed to add the s@city_name = ‘city_name’; attribute at the detail level before exporting.
Was hoping to get something nice in GDC related to city building. I guess it’s left for us to solve.
im using the version of houdini they built this in not getting any errors but im when I press export all pbc im also not getting and PDG or PBC folder
hi i couldnt find that hip folder can you help me with that
Same error here. I put the comma in all Print lines, which are 40, 44, and 253.
After that apparently, no error occurred until now.