What does the Houdini plugin for UE4 do exactly? What advantages does it offer? I have done some reading about Houdini, and it seems like a very capable 3D software package. I’m considering switching from Maya to Houdini, but I don’t know if it’s right for me. For those of you who use it, what are your thoughts?
Houdini has some tools that allow you to create things procedurally and you can then set up some parameters that allow you to change settings in the asset, the plugin basically brings that functionality to something like UE4, so you can create an asset in Houdini and then export that to UE4 and it will have those parameters available for you to adjust within Houdini. It’s like they took the core of Houdini and put it into a plugin so that you can make changes in a separate software and have it update without having to send it to Houdini to update changes.
Amazing stuff
Houdini is great, esp for one man dev studio that has no time to waste. With houdini you sacrifice some quality but you ger enromous speed boost with creating assets. (what i mean is you still can do great quality stuff, but you also can do ok art very fast). Houdini is great when you know how to script creation of those meshes.
Wow, that sounds pretty awesome, so basically you can modify your assets with Houdini while they are in the game engine? If so, I wonder if you can use splines in Houdini for rendering hair or fur in the game engine? The indie license only costs 200$ so that’s not bad! Cheaper than Maya and it isn’t for an annual subscription. Still, I wonder can you use it as a bridge for rendering hair and fur in Unreal?
No, it’s the other way around. Basically Houdini has something like Blueprints where you could set up a sort of scripting setup to create objects procedurally, this plugin allows you to use the things you create with that system in UE4, so you could create an object that makes a customized building with the windows and doors in the appropriate locations automatically. In UE4 you’d be able to use that to easily customize the building without having to go back to Houdini or making each one from scratch. It’s not a system that allows you to use things that don’t work in a game engine like Hair and Fur.
Things like hair and fur are still a specific type of rendering effect that needs to be specifically designed for a game, like using the hair cards technique that most games use or using something like TressFX or Nvidia Hairworks.