Hey Forum!

When using Houdini Engine with UE4 - Do we need to manually bake out color maps and other uv maps such as those generated from the erosion tools in houdini (flow, debris etc.) ?

I have no problem importing the .otl into unreal via Houdini Engine - but it is not clear how Unreal/Houdini share all the data that exists on my points in houdini…

Would really appreciate some light shed on this!

Thanks,

Sam

Hi,

All Heightfield masks (debris, flow, water, bedrock etc…) are automatically converted to Landscape layers when imported to Unreal via the Houdini Engine plugin, so you don't need to bake any of these to files, the plugin will take care of this for you.

One common gotcha when using time dependent node (like HF_erosion) is that you need to use a timeshift node to advance the frame parameter, as HEngine always uses Frame 1. ( see HERE [www.sidefx.com] )

dpernuit
Hi,

All Heightfield masks (debris, flow, water, bedrock etc…) are automatically converted to Landscape layers when imported to Unreal via the Houdini Engine plugin, so you don't need to bake any of these to files, the plugin will take care of this for you.

One common gotcha when using time dependent node (like HF_erosion) is that you need to use a timeshift node to advance the frame parameter, as HEngine always uses Frame 1. ( see HERE [www.sidefx.com] )

Thanks for your response! Getting closer

Maybe this is one for the Unreal forum but:

I have noticed that those various masks attached to HF are coming into unreal as these strange ‘.h’ files in a Temp folder.



However they are not automatically being placed on the Landscape that is imported as a Layer. My imported landscape only has one ‘Heightmap layer’.


It is not clear how I can set up those files to be additional layers. It also seems those files cannot be imported into the material editor so I am unable to use them to build up a material.

I don't know what to do with them. I have tried this in version 4.18 and 4.19 and I'm getting the same behaviour.

Do you have any ideas? Is there something undocumented that I need to do on the Houdini side of things to get Unreal to bring in all those masks into something usable?

Thanks again

Hi,

That's normal, you're in sculpt mode, only height shows up there, go to the paint tab, and you should see the list of your landscape layers there!
You can visualize them when on that tab by using the “Layer Debug” visualizer in the viewport.

Those files in the HoudiniEngine/Temp are actually required by UE4, and store the layers data.

And layers can be used in a material by using the “Landscape Layers …” node in the material editor.
See HERE [docs.unrealengine.com]

amazing! it works! I'm so happy

The only thing i'm missing now is the height map - it seems that doesn't get imported in as an additional layer. is there a fast way to get that height map into a material shader?

Thanks

The height mask is not used as a layer, but used to create the geometry of the landscape…

If you insist on having height as a layer, you could duplicate it and rename it to something else in Houdini, but landscape layers have a very low resolution so I'd not recommend doing this…

It's probably way better to directly use the existing height from the landscape via the WorldPosition/WorldToLocal/.. nodes from the material editor.

thanks so much for your help - Houdini Engine HF's demystified!

Sam

This tip with timeshift… this should go to documentation…

It's already in the plugin docs, see the link I posted above on my first reply…