Hi,

What I would like to have in the Houdini Instancer Manager UI in Unity is predefined slots for possible objects instancing.

Currently, the Instancer will display only slots for object it knows exists. For example, if I am building a wall and by default, wall pieces are 50 meters only. Then I will have only one slots available which an instance slot for a 50 meters object.

But the user can change parameter on the wall and this could generate wall pieces of different sizes. 20 meters for example. In realtime, the Instancer will add the 20 meters object slots if the user manage to generate a 20 meters wall piece by playing with the settings of the asset.

But the Instancer doesn't know this 20 meters slots from the start. Since by default all my pieces are 50 meters.

What I want is to be able to generate these slots from the start. 50, 40, 30, 10 meters. Even if the Instancer makes no use of these size, a user could fill in these slots with the appropriated mesh before playing with settings.

How could I create slots for Unity meshes. Maybe use static Houdini UI? Is it possible to create a Houdini parameter that can take a Unity mesh as input for instacing?

Thx!
Christian

There's no direct way to affect the UI of the instancer. On the other hand, there's no way the instancer can know all possible unique instances ahead of time without cooking the asset with all possible parameter values.

Your best bet is to have your asset always instance all possible variations of the wall by default (first cook). This way, all variations will stay even if changes in the asset's parameters make it only use 1 or 2 variation. Once the instancer in Unity knows of a possible unique instance variation it will never remove the UI element for it.

Hi, I have been trying this approach ( i.e having all possible instances on the first cook).
Everything is normal the first time I preview the game. But if I preview it a second time without rebuilding the asset, all the prefabs ( that I fed into my instancer HDA) loose their position, they are all displayed at 0,0,0 in the world, and , in the scene hierarchy, they are not children of the “instancer” anymore, but belong to root instead. And finally when I stop the game preview. the HDA is automatically rebuilt ( correctly ) , leaving me with a bunch duplicate prefabs at the scene origin.

What I am doing wrong ?

This sounds like a bug. Please send the bug details, preferably with an example asset and steps to reproduce, to: support@sidefx.com