I am searching for a workflow to animate morphing of 10 or more models of a cloud one into other. When the morphing animation is completed, I need to transfer it into Unity5 and show there inside a scene.

1. Is Houdini able to morph several different models with vertex colors one into other?
I have FBX files with static vertex colored meshes of a cloud, like on pictures attached, showing three different states. They can be represented with particle system or meshes, just to show how cloud develops from one state to other.

2. Can that animation from Houdini be transferred to Unity?

If there is any tutorial showing a similar case, I would like to check it.

tnx :wink: ,
minev

1. Your best bet is to convert your clouds to volumes, merge those, and then remesh the merged volume back to a mesh. You can preserve the color attributes throughout this process.

2. As long as you convert the volumes back to a mesh then Unity should be able to display the result, including vertex colors. However, you cannot bake this kind of animation as a Unity animation directly - even simple playback is tricky as it just used the playmode timer to evaluate frames (with no caching). What you might want to do instead is bake the animation from Houdini into a bunch of meshes that you then playback in Unity (instead of always recooking the merging on each frame).

There aren't many tutorials touching morphing animations for Unity because the plugin (and even Unity itself) don't really support this kind of animation - at least not out of the box.

Is the end product meant to be distributed to end-users or is it more of an in-house tool?

Thank you for quick response.

It is meant as an in-house tool, part of our visualization workflow for the clouds that are result of CFD simulations.

As you said, Unity does not have a OOTB support for sequence animation with caching. There are third party solutions that enable this in Unity, such as Mega Fiers etc.

Workflow you mention does not give advantage over simply extracting more states/meshes from original simulation data and feeding them into Unity as bunch of meshes to play a sequence of.

Are there any options in Houdini FX Unity integration that would enable to contribute to the workflow by building a volume/cloud shader in Unity or ability to bake meshed volume morphing animation into a FBX file?

At this time, our Unity integration does not provide much support for volumes or morphing animation. We primarily focus on what the host application already supports and Unity supports neither very well. We would have to implement both of these features, efficiently, from scratch in Unity. It's something we might do eventually if Unity doesn't but there are no plans to so anytime soon.

I understand.

At the moment, we rely on Unity due to plugins and community developing for VR, making it optimal platform.
Both of these functions will be needed, so I look forward for possible integration from Houdini.