Hi,

Unfortunately, for now, you can only create the mesh socket, not assign stuff to them.
Pre assignement for the sockets should be added in the near future.

Hi all,

Support for Mesh Sockets has been added in the latest build of the plug-in.

In order to get them to pop-up in Unreal, you need to assign points to a point group starting with the “socket” prefix.

Rotation and scale of the socket can be set up by adding “rot” and “scale” attributes to these points.
If the rotation attribute is not found, the rotation can be deduced from the normal (“N”) attribute if it's present.
The socket's name can be defined by using the “unreal_mesh_socket_name” attribute.

The sockets can also have actors pre-assigned to them by adding the “unreal_mesh_socket_actor” string attribute.
This attribute should contains the names of the actors that you want to assign to them (separated either by , or ; ), and these actors will automatically be attached to the sockets upon cook.

You can also attach actors to the generated sockets like you normally would, either by drag and dropping actors on the asset in the world outliner or by using “Attach to” in the context menu.

Please let us know of any questions, problems or suggestions you have regarding these!

Hi everyone,

The latest build of the plug-in has a feature that's been requested for a while:
you can now generate simple colliders (box, sphere, capsule and K-DOPs) as well as Convex Hulls ( similar to “UCX” for FBX) instead of relying on separate mesh components. These work using the same grouping convention as the previous colliders.

For convex hulls, you'll need to group your geometry in a group starting with collision_geo_ucx or rendered_collision_geo_ucx (if you want that part to be also visible) and a convex hull collider will be generated upon cook.

Simple colliders work in the same way, with the collision_geo_simple and rendered_collision_geo_simple groups.
By default, a DOP26 collider will be created, but you can specify the type of the desired colliders by adding it to the group name: box, capsule, sphere, kdop10X, kdop10Y, kdop10Z, kdop18 or kdop26.

ie: collision_geo_simple_sphere_xxxxx or rendered_collision_geo_simple_yyy_kdop10X

Let us know if you have any questions, suggestions or problems regarding that!

Hi all,

As of version 15.5.675, we have added blend shape support to the FBX exporter.
The exporter will now try to find Blend Shapes SOPs in Geometry nodes, and export them as
FBX blend deformers, creating Shapes for each of the blend inputs.

FBX being way more rigid than Houdini, blend shape nodes will only be exported if your network
is “FBX compatible”, that is if no modification to the geometry happens after the Blend Shapes.
Blend shapes animations are also exported, but the shapes by themselves cant be time dependent.

Nulls, switches, caches, nodes dealing with attributes, skin deforms or merges won't block the
blend shapes from being exported, but other nodes that will alter the geo, like a subdivide
for example, will.

However, there is an option to “Force Blend Shapes Export”, that will allow the blend shapes
to be exported by ignoring the incompatible nodes, but potentially losing information doing so.

See the attached images for simple examples: the first network will export the blend shapes by
default but the second one will need to force the export, because of the subdivide node.
The resulting FBX, will however not have the subdivisions.

Anyway, this will allow you to get your blend shapes / facial animations exported to FBX, but
might require some minor adjustment on your networks.

On a side note, for those of you who want to get the Blend Shapes / Morph Targets on UE4, be sure
to use the FBX201400 export, as UE cannot read FBX201600 properly.

Any feedback / bug report on this would be appreciated.

Hi all,

I was coming to tell that today's build was going to please you, seems that dragos beat me to it.

So as of build 15.5.675, FBX export does support blend shapes. It does unfortunately come with a few limitations, as the FBX file format is a bit rigid compared to what can be done in Houdini. If you don't have blenshapes after export, you might need to force their export, but doing so will ignore all the nodes that modifies the geometry after the blendshapes.

Also for UE, be sure to export using the FBX201400 export, as UE cannot read FBX201600 properly.

Some more details about the blendshapes export can be found here [sidefx.com]

Hi Skyform,
As chris said, the parameter reset bug was fixed last week, and the latest build of the plug-in should have the copy/duplication bug resolved too.

Ok, I see…

So this is actually what you get with the Unreal Plugin right now, rotating and scaling the curve points with the gizmos.
Unfortunately, it's not available on the Curve SOP in houdini for now…

Hi DASD,

I'm glad you like this, we have added quite a few features for the spline/curve in Unreal in the last weeks.

1 - a: Exactly, point attributes on the curve node in Houdini.

b & c: The type of attributes you'll get depends on the type of curve you are using, as Unreal's Spline components are now supported as World Outliner Inputs.

- for a Houdini Curve (aka “Input Curve”), you'll get rot (quaternion) and scale (Vector3) attributes on each control point.
Unless you rotate/scale a control point using the gizmos, default value will be (1,1,1) for scale and unit quaternion (0,0,0,1) for rotation.

- for a Unreal Curve (unreal Spline selected on a World Outliner Input), you'll get rot (quaternion) and pscale (float).
For Unreal curves, you'll get the refined positions of the spline, not just the control points and tangents as we cannot reproduce their behavior 1:1 in Houdini.

d: you'll get these attributes either by using InputCurve, or selecting an actor with an Unreal Spline (not a SplineMesh) as a world outliner input.


2 : These additions are only for the Unreal plug-in right now. I don't know if this is going to be added to the docs..

3 : I am not sure about what you mean? Splines are already in Houdini, we just handle them differently than in Unreal..