Hey Fellow Houdini User's,

I have been tasked with coming up with a way to use Houdini and Substance to make a semi-procedural weapon pipeline. But I am not sure how to get started or if this is even a good idea to use Houdini begin with. Here is how I see all of this working in my head.

Step one: Artist make individual meshes for the various pieces of the gun (for simplicity sake let's just say that the guns are only made up of receivers, barrels, stocks and scopes) in 3Ds Max or Maya or whatever DCG package they want. The UV's for the gun part's are laid out in the 0 to 1 UV space so that in the game engine they can all be composited and stored on the same 2k texture sheet.

Step Two: The various gun parts are then exported and imported into Houdini and some how put together so that the various gun parts line up perfectly and their UV's are all laid out in 0 to 1 UV space with out overlapping other parts(This is very important for this to work with a compositing system).

Step Three: Then a Houdini Digital asset is made out of them so that you can change whatever part you want for a different one and everything is laid out correctly without any overlapping UV's.

Step Four: With the completed gun done it could then be exported and imported loaded into Substance Designer and then with a few clicks have all the textures and edge wear created and ready for export. (This is the only part that I know exactly how it will work.)

Step Five: With the completed gun and texture the object can now be loaded in the game engine and used.

What got me started on this idea is seeing how Houdini digital assets can now be used in Maya and Unity. On past projects where we had complex weapon making pipeline there where almost always issues where someone used the wrong weapon template or something did not line up correctly or something like that and that is what I am trying to figure out how to avoid.

In a perfect world I would like to have it so that artist have to only worry about making the pieces of the guns and make sure that UV's are in the 0 to 1 space. Then all of the construction and merging of the gun would happen behind the scenes and this way there would be the least amount of mistakes made as possible.

Does any one have suggestion on where I can get started with this? I am still in the very early stages of working this out but have no idea where to get started in Houdini. Can any one see this working or am I doing something that is just not really wise to be doing with Houdini?

Okay so after a little messing around and some searching of the internet I figured out how to get most of what I wanted in a very simple setup. I am having some issues with the following things. If any one has any pointers it would be greatly appreciated.

1: While the Vertex Color looks good in the UV its displayed wrong in the 3D view port. Is there something that I am doing incorrectly with the nodes?

2: Importing from 3Ds Max via .FBX was a huge hassle and in the end I used Maya. When using 3Ds Max all the objects did not have the correct scale and all of them were squashed in the y axis. Did anyone else run into this when using Max? If so any ideas what I could be doing wrong when importing.

The next thing that I am going to look into is going to be a better way to construct the gun from the various pieces. Right now all the placement of the pieces is by hand and I would like to figure out if its possible the use the objects pivot point to snap it in place. This way all the artist has to do is set the pivot point in the correct location and import and its done. Here is a piece of what I have done so you can have a look and offer your feedback.

So I had an epiphany last night about this system and while I am not abandoning my current way I got to thinking that maybe I am thinking about this the wrong way. Maybe I should be making this so that it can generate the base mesh instead of just using it to pick different parts that are already made to make a gun. I don't know if this is still a good idea but something that I am actively thinking about as an addition to the current system.

Meanwhile I did figure out that there must be something wrong with the display of colors on my Home PC because the weird vertex color issue that I was having at home do not happen on my work PC. So that's a little progress so far, be it that it's not that much.

I will keep posting as I make update to the system and come up with new ideas for how to make this work. As always any and all feedback is more than welcomed.

Step Two: The various gun parts are then exported and imported into Houdini and some how put together so that the various gun parts line up perfectly and their UV's are all laid out in 0 to 1 UV space with out overlapping other parts(This is very important for this to work with a compositing system).