Unity Terrain Integration with Houdini Engine Indie

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Hi. I am not sure if I am doing something wrong or if I get the expected output.
I made a terrain in Houdini that I eroded and wanted to export.

So I made a digital asset from the heightfield and its manipulations.

The asset, after importing in Unity, now has a tab/dropout called “Terrain”. When I click inside a terrain layer, Unity is stuck for a few moments (more like half a minute) and then it opens up the tab where I see some sort of default material, but no colors or anything.

Is there a way to include textures into the digital asset so I dont have to assign everything in Unity manually?

I found that after baking the terrain, I could replace the terrain layers (represented not by images, not even clickable, but by tiny white squares that you cannot even click), but this seemed rather buggy to me.

It would be nice if someone could point me into the right direction or give me some advise on this.
Thanks ahead!

(oh and last time I opened up my terrain-project in houdini, the height was flipped. so the mountains now spawn water, while the sea doesnt… why is that and how to prevent?)
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“Is there a way to include textures into the digital asset so I dont have to assign everything in Unity manually?”

I recommend watching the Indie Pixel Tutorial https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/pdg-for-indie-gamedev-section-3-creating-terrains/?collection=61 [www.sidefx.com]
He uses PDG but I'm pretty sure it will also work for non PDG projects.

And check out the docs at SideFX https://www.sidefx.com/docs/unity/_attributes.html [www.sidefx.com]
You have to create a unity_hf_XXX Attributes to set Textures.
Edited by ThomasSpaceflower - April 16, 2019 05:57:45
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The “Textures” you are generating in Houdini are really just masks. What you can do is export the masks into the Terrain system as terrain masks then apply textures in Unity. I'm not an expert but I spent a lot of time trying to solve the problem you have without understanding the issue. I did the same thing and followed the tutorial above where he generated beautiful “terrains” in Houdini but they are not actually textures and need to be handled differently. The HeightField and Terrain are not geometry but basically just a height mask so need to be handled a little differently to keep the formats. Or you could just export the HF as a mesh (some of the Resample nodes I think are useful here) and texture it normally but it will lose the benefits of being a Terrain.

If anyone can improve my answer I would love to hear it, I have been stuck on this for a while as well.
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