Hello,

I'm trying to create an HDA Tool for Unreal Engine 5.1 that can render/bake an houdini point cache file for a niagara system. This must work in the unreal editor, because I want to ship my HDA Asset and users shouldn't require Houdini Indi.

In theory it should work like this:
The "Labs Niagara ROP Render" Button (parameter:execute) was integrated in my HDA Parameters. In UE I can press it to bake a point cloud animation that is based on the previous output of my tool (changed size of box e.g.)
When I bake the point animation directly in Houdini and re-import the resulting file in Unreal my niagara system works just fine and inherits the frame range correctly.

If I bake the animation within the Unreal Editor (by pressing the render button), it just clamps my frame range to 240 (default I assume) and ignores the range I setup in Houdini (in this case 500).


This problem is quite specific, if someone knows a possible solution for this please let me know.
Cheers!

I figured it out:
In case someone has the same issue I thought I should post my learnings.

In my network I have a ForEach Loop that uses a Transform Node to iterate over some Curves to randomly transform them.
I use the ForEach "Iteration" Metadata in conjunction with the random method to come up with new transforms for my curves.
It looks like this transform node needs a keyframe at the very end of my framerange, otherwise the HDA Tool in unreal will use a default frame range of 240.

I'm quite new to houdini and this is one of those problems you figure out by haphazardly playing around and brute force your way through.