I am trying to do an effect where I am emulating cars on a road. I have all of the Houdini logic figured out, I am just moving points along a curve, and now I want to instance those in Unreal using the Houdini Engine. I would use the “unreal_instance” variable to define my car instances, which would be StaticMesh or Blueprints(can I instance Blueprints?). Just to be clear, the objects I am trying to instance themselves are not animated, only the point attributes (position, N…). I am pretty experienced in Houdini but extremely new to Unreal. I have done a bit of research and these seem like my options.

1- Load in the whole setup as an .otl in Unreal and with my points procedurally moving (no sims or caches). I would have the instance variable so it would be instancing all the right cars from within my Unreal project file. Unfortunately, it seems like Unreal does not update the Engine when I run it, correct me if I am wrong (I need to test it for myself). In this case, all my cars would be static, which I do not want.

2- Ideally I could also write out the points as a cache and somehow use that. Is this possible? I saw I can import particles into Niagra through a .csv file, however it does not seem to be able to accept strings. I am a bit more uneducated on this route.

I was wondering what the best way to do this was, even if it means not using Houdini Engine. I would also have to bake out the instances as actors (or Blueprints), as we only have 1 Windows Houdini Engine license right now (we have plenty for Linux), and the final computer we are playing this on will not have Houdini installed.

Thanks for your help. Hopefully this is something that I can work out.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how I might solve this, or is it maybe totally impossible?

Wished the staff would have answered this post. Having the same problem and CAN'T find ANYTHING on the web. I just need to rotate the instances of the packed geo for cogwheels. The same here. In Houdini everything works great. but no way to rotate something in Unreal. It's 2020. Sigh…