Houdini Engine for 3dsmax and Unreal Announced !!!

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Side Effects is pleased to announce plans to release Houdini Engine plug-ins for 3DS Max and Unreal in late 2014. These two plug-ins join a growing list that also includes Cinema 4D and Unity® which are also planned for release in 2014. The Unreal plug-in is being developed by Side Effects while the 3DS Max plug-in is being created by independent developer Hideki Suzuki who began coding right after the release of Houdini Engine source code on GitHub in April.
“Once I downloaded the code from GitHub, I couldn’t wait to dive in,” says Hideki. “The Houdini Engine API was easy to work with and I had simple digital assets loading into 3DS Max within hours of getting started. I was pleased that the cooked results were obtained so easily. The new Houdini Engine license offers an affordable option for both artists and developers while being able to run the Houdini Engine using my existing Houdini FX license worked perfectly for my development needs.”

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YES! YES! YES!

Just a little excited about this.

So my guess is it’s a content creation tool, that includes things like modeler functionality, package, or asset converter, if it’s a basic complete package.

Sounds nice, I’m not using 3DS Max at this point, so is 3DS Max required or would it just work with Unreal Engine as is once the plugin comes out so that the content I’m assuming would be created inside a Houdini tool and then exported and imported into Unreal Engine is this correct, or is Houdini Engine just the conversion system for procedural animation of parsed geometric data with their offset values translated among **world **and local space from stored dynamic values which become **static **for final presentation?

If it’s not the complete package, what would make this package complete so it all works together as designed aside from the plugin?

Hopefully, it wouldn’t require a regular fee of $500 to $1000 or more for part of the package for conversion and several thousand dollars for complete package including a modeler, particles, fluid simulation, and **physics **implementation with animation pipeline and instead would be more like DAZ Studio Pro with Hexagon, Blender, Sketchup, and **Lightwave **with **RealFlow **and misc plugins and tools, etc…

Does it interface and utilize Havoc, PhysX, Tokamak, Box2D, or any of the Physics Engine Technologies listed here?:

I like how these modern tools can handle massive copies of geometry with core optimizations happening in the background and some jittering and/or blending to make it all work together. Volumetric, Quad Based, Point, Triangular, Tessellation, and Lighting Calculations with **Rays **and **Physics **and Collision Detection, love it all!

-Thank you!