I want to try combining Houdini and Unreal for animation.
Using the render speed of UE for most of the scene and Metahuman, but incorporating Karma renders when necessary for their quality.
Have a couple questions before going in if anyone has experience.

Can UE output proper AOVs for compositing with offline renders?
Do USD scenes/assets work well between Houdini and Unreal?
Does MaterialX work between them?
Any major issues to be aware of?

I don’t think it is that easy. You basically have to build UE shaders from scratch.

I don’t think Houdinis shader translate to Unreal at all.

Unreal is still working on some mtlx compatibility with Substrate. But not sure it will be 1:1.

I think USD scenes would work for set dressing but not much for animation. Correct me if I am wrong.

When it comes to some vdb animations, particles, and so on… I think you rebuild the scene from Houdini to Unreal manually with FBX, alembics, VAT, animated vdbs …

Very high ress alembics from Houdini can get over 100 GB large and Unreal will basically drop frames. And loose some of its realtime capabilities.

I am also very much interested in this topic using fast Unreal rendering with Houdini scenes but I don’t think it is simple.

Hey and thanks for the reply.

Yeah it does seem it would be too good to be true.
Was hoping all this USD interoperability would be more solid, but it still seems pretty limited.

For VDBs the new Zibra VDB format could help, but I guess real-time renderers will always struggle with large data sets like FLIP too.