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Houdini Engine for Unreal
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Houdini Engine for Unreal
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The plug-in provided classes are designed to be cooked and packaged transparently, meaning they contain very little code of their own.
One of the major change that was made in Version 2, was to design all runtime classes and components of the plugin to act as simple data holders, drastically reducing their potential runtime footprints.
In a game build they will be invisible but for their output components ( StaticMeshComponent, Landscapes etc ).
If there are HoudiniAssetActors in your maps, the HoudiniEngine plug-in must be built as part of the runtime build of your game.
The Houdini Engine plug-in includes the source code, for example:
C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini X.Y.Z\engine\unreal\4.26-v2\HoudiniEngine
The source code folder, HoudiniEngine, can be copied into the Plugins folder of your engine source, for example:
C:\UE4Source\Engine\Plugins\Runtime
The UE4 build process will then pick up and build the HoudiniEngine plugin when building/packaging.
The plug-in source can also be downloaded on the GitHub repository: https://github.com/sideeffects/HoudiniEngineForUnreal-v2
An alternative approach to this is to Bake your Houdini Engine-based assets to Unreal-native actors and remove the HoudiniActors before cooking your content.
This will remove the dependencies on the Houdini-Engine plug-in, and the game-build of the plug-in will not be required.
Additionaly, you can use the Bake And Replace All Houdini Assets entry in the Houdini Engine menu in Unreal to replace all the houdini assets in the current level with their baked counterpart.
The Bake Folder (the folder where the baked assets will be stored) is determined by first checking for the "unreal_bake_folder" attribute on the asset (prim, detail). If this not set then the property in the details panel is used. If the property is also not set, then the default bake folder configured in the plugin settings is used.
However, once a level is finalized in this way, the Houdini Assets will have to be recreated manually in order to modify the procedural content again. As it is not currently possible to automatically recreate an HDA from baked content, and manual recreation will likely take time, we recommend using this workflow mainly when content has been finalized.
1.8.6 
