Hey there.

Is there any other way to deal with textures from Unity other than just using a direct file path and file nodes?
It works okay, but maybe there is a more integrated method/approach that would suit better.

Please expand on that. Do you want to upload / download texture data, or provide full path to textures? Is this for both directions (Houdini to Unity, and/or Unity to Houdini)?

Currently you can assign textures in Houdini and they will be extracted in Unity.

I want to use textures as heightmaps and distribution maps etc.
Until now I have just used a Heightfield File/Heightfield Output node pair and ROP File Output in a COP network.

Or said in another way. I load PNGs directly into Houdini around Unity and same with writing them back out.

But in Unity you just grab the texture2D object representing a texture when working in C#.
I am trying to get around the fact that Houdini doesn't read 16bit RAW files and Unity doesn't support 16 bit PNG, but support just R16 Textures. So we write out heightmaps as a .raw file and store as a ScriptableObject with a Texture2D. On top of that I also have a 16bit PNG for Houdini.

Any operations to any of these will have to be mirrored in the other two and it's a bit tedious