So, I been playing with the plugin for a few days and found alot of issues that make it almost unusable in a production environment. I'll start off and say I am very excited we have this plugin and think it a great addition and something I been looking forwards too since I saw a presentation in 2012 with houdini and udk working together. But as it stands it doesn't work how I would expect.

First thing is you can't reimport and constantly update digital assets. I tried a few times with simple things like changing a float to a int and adding parms but every time I did either it would crash. Or best case not take the changes on assets already placed. This to me is a fundamental flaw. You aren't going to know if your asset is ever final. This means I would never be able to go through and update all my assets. Meaning it can result in entire stages being reworked and redone just for small changes. What If I found out I needed a LOD and wanted to generate that in houdini and add that to my asset. Welp can't.. With the current implementation of the plugin.

So bullet one is Doesn't effectively handle updates of the digital assets on assets already placed in the level.

Another issues along with bullet one is from what I have seen it doesn't like copy and pasting for digital assets. To me this is almost as bad as not being able to update values on placed assets on digital asset updates. Why when I copy and paste a digital asset don't I have access to it parms anymore?!!?!?! These are core bugs that to me puts this plugin closer to a alpha or pre alpha than beta. These are fundamental usability issues.


Bullet two will be mesh settings for unreal. To me this is a even bigger issue. I don't wanna have to constantly bake my assets just to change distance field resolution for static meshes. This is something that should and needs to be added. Else it going to be a hindrance. Alot of assets need a build setting for distance field shadows higher than the default 1. This means you have to bake to update these assets. What if your using houdini to generate buildings and wanna constantly update them or furniture. I have to rebake 100's of times?

Bullet Three UI
For me this is a smaller issue but it feels like it doesn't generate a nice clean ui that I have Houdini.. This can cause some digital assets to become a nightmare to change settings on and causes alot of unneeded scrolling.

Bullet Four

I think this is a more general issue with Houdini but something they really should embrace is a community system similar to Epic. I don't feel as if houdini is the most user friendly application and has the most potential out of all of them. There really is a lack of tutorials that would really help a individual grow and be very successful. I hunted and reviewed a vast chunk out of whats out there and it really doesn't exist. It not like maya or max where I can find a tutorial on x and use it for another application. So that probably my own personal gripe.

Hello, thank you for feedback. I will try to address the issues you have raised, but please do let me know if I missed something.

1. You can use recook / rebuild asset button in details panel to update instance if your underlying asset has changed. If you find this is not working, please do file a bug / provide context / provide example assets so we could reproduce the issue.

2. We have mesh generation settings in Project Settings / Plugins / Houdini Engine. You can change defaults and that's what plugin will use when it creates static meshes (either internally or when baking).

3. We will be updating UI and adding support for missing parameter types as well as Folders. Please expect big update on this in next couple of weeks. Same with material support.

4. I can't really comment on this and you should probably raise this issue in a relevant sub-forum.

Thanks.

Thanks for the reply! The feedback was more related to there being core bugs or features missing. For example if your building a game around dynamic lighting/distance fields. In my case there no setting to adjust the distance field build resolution scale. This is a big oversight since you probably already know on a asset by asset base what you want the default to be.

It sounds like I did find a bug because the recook/rebuild never worked properly for me it always created a crash or didn't update the values. I figured the UI would be updated cause currently it would be a nightmare on big assets.

But to me the biggest issue is the lack of copy and pasting and even presets. If I had the ability to copy paste my assets and apply presets. I probably could get past all the other issues.

Also there a lack of support within blueprints.. I can't expand a houdini asset to link up with blueprints which to me is a issue incase I wanted to use per existing blueprints and just expand on them with houdini assets for modeling.

Unknown exception - code 00000001 (first/second chance not available)

Assertion failed: (Index >= 0) & (Index < ArrayNum)
Array index out of bounds: 0 from an array of size 0

KERNELBASE + 35740 bytes
UE4Editor_Core!FOutputDeviceWindowsError:erialize() + 292 bytes
UE4Editor_Core!FOutputDevice::Logf__VA() + 248 bytes
UE4Editor_Core!FDebug::AssertFailed() + 1079 bytes
UE4Editor_HoudiniEngine!UHoudiniAssetParameterChoice::CreateParameter() + 485 bytes
UE4Editor_HoudiniEngine!UHoudiniAssetComponent::CreateParameters() + 1031 bytes
UE4Editor_HoudiniEngine!UHoudiniAssetComponent::TickHoudiniComponent() + 1325 bytes
UE4Editor_Engine!FTimerUnifiedDelegate::Execute() + 571 bytes
UE4Editor_Engine!FTimerManager::Tick() + 250 bytes
UE4Editor_UnrealEd!UEditorEngine::Tick() + 925 bytes
UE4Editor_UnrealEd!UUnrealEdEngine::Tick() + 22 bytes
UE4Editor!FEngineLoop::Tick() + 4179 bytes
UE4Editor!GuardedMain() + 1404 bytes
UE4Editor!GuardedMainWrapper() + 26 bytes
UE4Editor!WinMain() + 249 bytes
UE4Editor!__tmainCRTStartup() + 329 bytes


Everytime I recook or rebuild a asset I have updated… significantly.

Hello!

As an update, we have added support for folders and did some UI clean up. We also have scheduled work for other types of parameters, such as multiparms and handles.

We also added support for copy pasting assets. Copy pasting will copy generated geometry and materials from the cooked asset/Houdini component. This will not trigger asset instantiation or cooking for the copied asset/component/actor. Subsequent parameter change on this copied asset will trigger asset instantiation and cooking.

Please let me know if you still have issues with recook / rebuild asset; if you do find such a problem, please log a bug through our system and provide a sample asset so we could reproduce the issue.

We do not support Blueprints at this time; you should be able to add Houdini components to Blueprint but nothing will happen. We are definitely looking into adding this in the future, but we need to address quite a few issues before this can happen. The only functionality regarding Blueprints which will work is Blueprint baking - you should be able to generate Blueprint from any instantiated asset - this will create corresponding static mesh and instanced static mesh components and attach them to Blueprint. As well as bake out necessary static meshes.

Thank you very much for your feedback!