Hey guys, to both of you. I couldn’t find any way forward inside Unreal, so I actually started looking more into NVIDIA Omniverse. Their ‘Create’ app is kind of like Unreal, just aimed more at offline rendering. They have a realtime renderer which looks nice and a couple of ‘not so realtime’ ones which can create nice-looking translucencies and the like. Definitely check it out (if you’ve got an NVIDIA card that is 
).
Exporting from Houdini, I can load things in Create and then make those USD changes, as you would expect. Probably a better way to spend your time, if it doesn’t HAVE to be Unreal.