Hi crowdy people out there!

I have had an idea about using Houdini to make a stadium crowd for Unreal that will react to events inside Unreal.
Having used Houdini Crowds a little bit, I have a rudimentary grasp of the BASICS. However, I do not know anything about Unreal.

First question:
Is it a good idea? I suspect there may be easier ways to make crowd sims inside Unreal. Does anyone know if that is true?

Second question:
Can it be done? I have looked at making HDAs and importing that into Unreal but I could not work out how to get the crowd agents to play their clips. I have looked at the VAT method but I get an error when it renders - somerthing about ‘error rendering child’. No idea.

Third question:
Has anyone had experience with Atoms? I see they have a Unreal product.

If you think I'm running down a blind alley, please let me know!

Thanks, in ignorance,

Dan

Hi, in general it will be easier to go with atoms if you’re not familiar with Houdini crowd and plan to control crowd inside ue4, if you just want to export animated people from Houdini - vat and foliage scatter will give you really fast and lightweight results.
Try to unpack agents (preferably single agent per export) before rendering vat and wait for calculations to finish - should help.

Thanks a lot for your response, PPZ.

I'm looking into Golaem and some other software at the moment.

Sorry Houdini!