I'd like to use Houdini inside Unity3D to generate procedural organic entities.
In one of your video [vimeo.com] you check the Playmode Per-Frame Cooking option to process simulation like Rigidbodies.

1a) Does the simulation work in Unity3D Build mode ?
1b) For the same reasons I guess, changing exposed parameters works during playtime but not in Build.

2) Is there something planed to make Houdini simulation interact with Unity3D Colliders ? (Think about shatered objects)

I am not sure but, maybe the best approach would be to “bake” the simulation into an animation and only make a few things interact with the player and not every piece of the shattered object

or

shatter the objects in houdini and use unity physics…

Thanks for your answer Lune.

In fact, I mainly want to use Houdini for procedural organic entities.
For example growing plants with an infinity of variations a bit like L-System.

Baking anything is not an option since I want dynamic variables.

Can you confirm that any realtime simulation only works in Playmode now or did I miss something to make it work during Buildmode ?

Thanks again for your help !

After deeper look at the sources the cooking system is directly linked to the standalone application.

Since Unity3d application need to embed plugins for the target platform obviously anything dynamic won't work in build mode.

I guess they need to figure out how to produce working Houdini Engine Plugins without compromising the licensing system or something.

By looking at the release log, it's been a while since they didn't push something for this plugin so I guess it's not for tomorrow.

Too bad (

Could be great breakthrough in application symbiosis !

i have read that they have some license problems because you would need for every deployment of the product a license.

there are also some optimizations required because the houdini engine is be huge to be deployed.

what is coming i don't know but hopefully they are planning something.

This is really a NO GO! So the whole houdini engine makes no sense for me in unity.
Having procedural assets, that i cant modify on runtime, sounds like a joke to me. And that's why you don't hear of anyone using that houdini engine in unity.
They argue, that it would be like giving a maya or a photoshop to a unity build. Ähhhh, what about building a simple dll for giving away with the build?
I think they losing more then they are winning with this tactics. Because of a lot of people will not buy houdini and the unity engine because of that problem!
So, for substance materials its also possible, to change their procedural materials ingame, without packing a substance designer programm to the build, right??!

Once again, for the record, we do not have runtime support for Unity at this time.

That said, we know it's an important feature and we are actively working on finding solutions.

Still, just because car can't fly doesn't mean it's not still useful.