While following few tutorials on Houdini terrains I stumble on a problem with importing that terrain to UE 5.2.
I saved the terrain as Digital Asset in Houdini (.hdalc) and imported that into UE 5.2.
Then placed that asset to empty level. It successfully got cooked and I saw a terrain with no landscape materrial which is expected.
But from those tutorials I got info that paint layers should be created based on layers in terrain created in Houdini. But I don’t have any layer in UE 5.2.
Do I need to create those layers in landscape material beforehand or?
If I remember correctly, you can either reference an existing layer or create a new one.
In this example, I was hooking into a pre-existing layer to use the distance scale functions of the specified material after modifying the material from weight to heightmap-based blending:
I might have some better examples that aren’t using a pre-created layer. I’ll need to dig around in the old projects but hopefully these screenshots point you in the right direction. IIRC it was more of a ‘if it isn’t there it gets created’ sort of situation.
*edit; you need to have houdini create a landscape material first to able to create the layers. The layers are created within the landscape material. That should get you on the right track!
So I created landscape material and created 3 paint layers that are used in Houdini. On top of that I added a unreal_material node in Houdini network and copy/pasted reference from Landscape material in UE5 to Houdini.
Now another problem is bothering me. I added couple of parameters so I can change the landscape in UE5. However after each change (for example noise value or smth like that (that’s controlling Houdini landscape) UE5 is importing the landscape again and building textures which takes from 10 to 30 seconds… While following tutorial it should be pretty instantaneous.
Yeah in theory it should be to able to cook without fully re-importing everything. Probably a setting/subsequent change the tutorial didn’t cover.
Also, I’m not fully up to speed with regards to UE5 integration with houdini. world comp vs partition introduced some lower-level changes to everything even if you aren’t using those systems in your level.
Thanks! The screw in bone part does not sound fun at all… I got lucky, displaced oblique fracture to the 5th metatarsal that didn’t need surgery.
Anyways, have you been about to figure out the issue with HDA changes triggering re-import?
I was thinking this part from the link might have been related but on second glance, probably not
“By default, the Houdini Plugin creates a Landscape Edit Layer during cooking, which will cause the entire landscape and its loaded streaming proxies to be marked as dirty (if loaded). This can be disabled in the Houdini Asset Component by unchecking Temp Landscape Layers and will cause the HDA to cook directly to the baked layer. When working with World Partition levels is may be preferable to create these baked layers once, save them, and then iterate on small sections without recreating the layers.”
I was hoping someone else who knew more would have a definitive answer for you but maybe someone will see it with this reply bump.
