I don't really understand the workflow of doing real-time simulation/destruction in Houdini for UE4.. Based on my current knowledge, Houdini cannot do real-time VFX for UE4 alone and has to work hand-in-hand with Niagara in order to do real-time stuffs for UE?

I would be eternally grateful if you guys can point me to the resources for this workflow as well... I can't seem to find any of them although I'm pretty sure someone must have tried this realtime thing before..

P/S: Can anyone also explain what real-time effects are? I'm understanding it as: whatever effects that can take the current context into account and render based on those (i.e. an explosion smoke happening in the morning will have different lighting compared to one happening in afternoon, or fractures will interact with environment objects around it when being exploded out, etc..). Is that correct?

We have some Real-time FX tutorials at the bottom of this Learning Path page:

https://www.sidefx.com/learn/unreal/ [www.sidefx.com]