I completed the awesome “PDG for Indie Gamedev” tutorial series [www.sidefx.com] from Kenny Lammers and I'd like to share my comments and questions and maybe hear from other people having used PDG in Unity.
- It's very hard to debug PDG in Unity when everything works fine in Houdini, but a work item fails in Unity.
I often had issues with paths being wrong for Unity: In HDA Processor, the HDA path is supposed to be $PDG_DIR/hda/myhda.hda, but defaulted to $JOB/hda/myhda.hda. I forgot to change it several times and since there are no error messages, except the “FAILED” in the PDG Asset Link, it took a while each time to pinpoint which node was failing.
It's especially difficult when using the “HEngine Data” tag that hides nodes.
It would be very useful to have the name of the failed items (in the Unity console or as a tooltip in the work item status table), and as much info as we have in Houdini when middle clicking on a failed work item. - Also related, it would be useful to have more details of what's cooking in the PDG Asset Link. At least the names of the TOP nodes being processed in a tooltip or something. We're kind of blind compared to the amount of cool feedback we have in Houdini
- When building and testing the TOP network, Houdini and Unity share the same $PDG_DIR path to write and read data (mostly bgeo files) Can it create conflicts and issues? Is it better to always clean up this data when switching from Houdini to Unity and vice versa?
- Last question: In the tutorial, to make terrain textures show up correctly, their path have to start from a “Assets/Resources” folder and not have file extensions. Is it a Unity Engine constraint? I could not find any documentation on this.
Thanks a lot!
Alex