Hello!
Houdini is at the center of our level design pipeline and we have been using an HDA that takes a curve from blueprint as its input to build walls then takes static mesh actors into it's world outliner input to perform booleans for things like doors and windows. It was a good first attempt but is a bit of a pain to set up and manage. We are looking to enhance the process by spawning the boolean objects from houdini, then defining their size and shape later in unreal.

We've been hitting an obstacle involving communication between spawned instances and the HDA that created them. Is there a way to maintain this relationship? For example, and HDA that spawns a box and uses that box as an input in the HDA graph. In our experience once an object is spawned it has to be manually associated as an input object.

Thanks!

I'm not sure I understand the setup - could you attach a sample hda ?

Gladly! Here is the HDA that we use in Unreal to generate the walls based on either the default curve or a blueprint with a curve component.

The issue we are running into is that the merged objects for the boolean have to be manually assigned in the world oultiner input which is a bit of a pain as their numbers increase.

The second issue is the actors do not have an awareness of the curves position meaning if the curve is editted, the position of the assets does not update.

I'm wondering if we can get around this by creating the assets by spawning them by point attribute and also referencing them back as boolean assets after the spawn.

I appreciate an info you can give me,
Thanks!

For the 2nd issue I think you can just parent your HoudiniAssetActor to an empty actor and then parent your boolean actors to the same empty actor. Then you can move your curve and have the boolean inputs go along with it?

I can't think of a clever workaround for your primary problem. If the component had blueprint hooks you might be able to do something with a blutility, but unfortunately atm we only have C++ to work with.