WHAT
The folks over at SideFX have been working on some amazing tools in Houdini to amp up your UE4 capabilities. Ben is going to give us a brief update on the state of Houdini. Then Luiz and Paul will be diving in to some wonderful tools, such as UV-Layout, Poly Reduction, the Game Shelf 2.0, Pivot Painter, and more! Make sure to join the stream!
WHEN
Thursday, November 16th @ 2:00PM ET Countdown]
WHO
Ben Mears - Games Community Manager - SideFX - @The_BenMears](http://twitter.com/The_BenMears)
Luiz Kruel - Senior Technical Artist - SideFX - @luizkruel](http://twitter.com/luizkruel)
Paul Ambrosiussen - Game Intern - SideFX - @ambrosiussen_p](http://twitter.com/ambrosiussen_p)
Amanda Bott - Community Manager - @amandambott](http://twitter.com/amandambott)
Pop any questions you have for the stream in the comments below!
Detailed Tool Notes:
Houdini 16.5 comes with great new tools that game-developers have been asking for! Included are the new more efficient UV-Layout, Poly Reduction Tool, and the awaited Game Shelf 2.0, of which we will be highlighting the biggest ones!
With the improved Texture Sheet tool, Pyro Preview Tool, and the Motion Vectors tool we will show you how to get cinematic quality simulations to the engine.
The Impostor Tool allows an artist to generate a 2D approximation plane of the provided mesh up to 360 degrees of viewing angles. This is great for distant objects, FX, and much more. They will be covering how easy it is to generate these inside Houdini and how to port them over to Unreal Engine.
OSM allows users to convert real life map data into raw geometry that could be used to either quickly prototype cities, generate functional road-networks, or build distant cityscapes using Houdini Engine inside Unreal.
Pivot Painter is a Houdini Digital Asset (HDA) that stores model pivot and rotation information in the model’s vertex data and additional UV channels like the 3DsMax implementation. The Houdini implementation allows for packing this information on both procedural and non-procedural content.
Bringing optimized destruction simulations from DCC’s to a game engine has always been a time consuming task. With the procedural workflow in Houdini using the “Destruction Cleanup” Houdini Digital Asset (HDA), this data can be optimized very easily, and get converted to a format suitable for an engine like Unreal.
Houdini 16’s powerful terrain tools enable the user to create content as detailed as they desire and the Terrain Mesh ROP and Terrain Texture ROP allow for baking this content down to usable formats, making it easier to port into the engine.
Artists love kitbashing meshes together in Unreal to create beautiful scenes, but this often results in a lot of hidden polygons and a high number of actors in the scene. Using the Remove Inside Faces HDA, you can batch these together and only keep the parts you need. This tool will show how easy it is to create an HDA yourself, and publish it for artists to use in HEngine.
**ARCHIVE
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