Houdini Engine for Unreal 4 Beta

[Bullit]

Finally available, download link:

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option= ... Itemid=381

Houdini games reel GDC 2015

[Draise]

That's pretty neat. Can some of the procedural assets also be created with their blueprint system already in Unreal?

[Mathaeus]

Afaik Blueprint is more for game play, which somehow naturally belongs to engine itself. Events, triggers, logic, so on. Otherwise someone will need to re-assemble the complete game play in something else, which is long, no sense work.

Imho Houdini could fit nicely into content creation. There's practice to assemble characters from parts, for example user can choose between human or elf's pointy ear, fit the various cloth onto character and such. In other words, no big deal to utilize H as an exaggerated, heavily customized Poser, plus ability to check and fix the parts (created in another app), transfer various attributes, or just weld the parts.
However, I didn't noticed something like this, in promo movie, it seems they used H for more or less, standard procedural creation (arrays of clones, simple construction history), available in another 3d apps, too.

[Draise]

Curious, I see your point. VERY handy, Specially if you'd know houdini. It would save a lot if time.
The reason I was asking was that I just saw a feature video in unreal that had a procedural fence line with rows and corners and length done in Blueprint, I was just wondering how far you could use it.

[Bullit]

I think i have read Fabric Paul saying they are also looking at Unreal blueprints for inspiration regarding FE 2.0 so i think there are some good ideas there at least.

[nodeway]

... VERY handy...

Houdini in a game pipeline:

[Mathaeus]

Curious, I see your point. VERY handy, Specially if you'd know houdini. It would save a lot if time.
The reason I was asking was that I just saw a feature video in unreal that had a procedural fence line with rows and corners and length done in Blueprint, I was just wondering how far you could use it.

Just about procedural fences, first one I sow, belongs to POV-Ray. Perhaps not the best example of capabilities, as probably anything could do this, for a long time. However there's drawback of any procedural creation. When it comes to detailing, especially if you want something specific, suddenly you could run into tons of parameters, or, you just want to freeze the thing, to proceed in completely destructive, 'manual' way. No big deal to place bricks in pattern on the roof, but when it comes to cuts through rows of bricks, this is completely new mechanism, in best case x times slower than plain distribution.

What I mentioned about Houdini, actually is not hard to do, it's design of app, allowing to have multiple geometry imports from hard disk, also, multiple exports back to hard disk, all that in one network. I think it's enough to read Jordi Bares PDFs, one about data management, to figure out how thing works. But, to feed that mill, you want some content too, where creation of content probably exceeds the bounds indie development. Let's say one Houdini user is able to process the work of ten users of any other 3d, or much more. So, more for large pipeline - if you're already proficient in modeling, texturing or animation, I'd believe anyone with sane mind, won't force you to use Houdini.

Also, there's chance to find something else, perhaps not so 'wide' as H, but better refined for exact thing - let's say in fashion of Max plugins, sometimes limited, but also the 'best beast' for what they are doing.

[Bullit]

The best non destructive software in have found are MCAD like Solidworks, Catia etc. In them every hole, cut is a step.