Hi all, I'm following along with the PDG for Indie Game Dev tutorial and I'm wondering what the equivalent to PDG asset link is in Houdini Engine for Maya. I can't seem to access any of my TOP node capability.

Houdini engine for Maya currently only supports Sop and Object Assets. Load asset will let you try to load a TOP node, but it will generally fail to instantiate them.

So far, we've only started looking at simpler workflows for using pdg from the Maya plugin, how to load an asset with an entire pdg graph, how best to expose the cook controls, and the cook status, how to bring the data files back into Maya.

Where do you see an advantage to being able to build a TOPs graph interactively in Maya? As opposed to accessing a preexisting TOPS graph in Maya to specify how to get data in and out? Any feedback about how you'd envision using PDG from Maya would be helpful.

Thank you for the response and the information.

I'd like to build a way for our Environment and layout team to build/modify terrain and scatter vegatation assets via Houdini Engine for Maya.

Bringing in TOPs nodes as individial DG nodes would not be that natural a fit in the way that that the DG evaluates and how PDG cooks its its graph. Do you want to be able to build/edit a PDG graph inside Maya? Or are you mostly expecting to use it selectively control the cooking/dirtying of parts of the graph? For and setting parms?

Are you thinking about a completely file based workflow for your pdg graph? Or would you still want to encapsulate it in an asset where you can bring in geo directly from maya, and output geo from the asset to visualize/modify further in ?maya

If editing the PDG graph is going to be a tightly coupled part of your workflow, would it be sufficient to have pilotpdg more easily available for editing- i.e. being able to send to pilotpdg rather than houdini from the plugin, reloading the new TOPs graph with a minimum of mouse clicks and a way to apply the changes to your live graph so that only the appropriate parts of the graph are dirtied

If you're just looking at dirtying and cook controls, would an interface that looked a lot like the TOP graph work better? How about editing parms in the top graph?

Being able to dirty and cook parts of the graph would be ideal, I'm thinking having the graph isolated in Houdini would be best for our Maya users. I'm thinking being able to go back and forth would also be best. Editing exposed paremeters inside of another package
is likewise the goal, Essentially being able to do what Indie-Pixel did in unity with this tutorial https://www.sidefx.com/learn/collections/pdg-for-indie-gamedev/ [www.sidefx.com] in Maya. I noticed editable nodes don't come through type properties in Maya or Unreal like they do in Unity, though that may be a problem with my workflow and understanding.

Apologies for the delay in reply, and thank you for the response.

Any update on this?