hi all,

our team is planing for a new company(startup) and i want to make a proof of concept with a game engine (unity or unreal) for showing to the investors.

sadly i can't give information about the product but i can say what i want todo.

i have to make a configurator for a product and when the customer changes a parameter the product changes is shape.
for that i need in background a geometry engine for the product manipulation. because it's a proof of concept it doesn't have to be 100% correct or must run on a tablet or smartphone. maybe it will run on a windows(x86) tablet but even that is not a must.

1. approach
i have read that in the unity editor at runtime the houdini engine works so when this is true i can make a interface for the unity editor and can use houdini engine for that. would that be correct?
is it also possible in the unreal engine todo something like that?

2. approach
use the game engine make a runtime game(interface) and run houdini in the background as a service that creates mesh files on the fly. like in this old video:
https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1827&Itemid=344 [sidefx.com]

it would be nice if someone can give some tips or advice which way to go.

thx

francis

If all you need is to show this off as a proof-of-concept and you are ok doing this entirely in the Editor, Approach #1 should work.

That said, my concern is that showing off procedural geometry generation in the Editor, even as a proof-of-concept, might make people believe that with some minimal additional work the same procedural geometry generation can be implemented in a standalone shipped application - something that won't be possible for some time. However, both approaches have this problem so #1 is still my recommendation.

To answer your other question, if in-editor is all you need, this is indeed also possible in UE4.

Which platforms will the final application be required to run on?

thank you damian for your feedback.

the investor gets a business plan and there is on multiple pages shown that we will develop the system in 12 months and not faster. :-)
whats also is that we will have full control of the hardware and software so we can decide what system we will use.

the platform will be more like a server -> client approach so we will do the geometry manipulation on the server side. but that's more a development and cost reason(license) we think we will use a cad system as a core in the finale stage.

i know that there will be a interactivity lag but i think it would be interesting to see how big the difference will be of these two concepts and how we can optimize it that the customer won't feel it that much.

Great! There are also some changes coming in Houdini 15.0 that should help decouple the Houdini Engine work from the runtime (Unity/UE4). This would make it easier to go after that client/server approach.

If you're on AUP I can go into more detail and you can try the new features right away. If not, the public Houdini release is coming up soon (in the next 2-3 months). Just ping me when its out and I'll fill you in on the new features.

thanks damian for the offer, well i'm not in the AUP so i will see what H15 will bring new suprises when its out . :-)

Made a small Example (was very simple todo), it could even work on the WebGL if I change the Fileloader because in this test it's uses just a simple FTP. The communication is based on the REST Method.

https://vimeo.com/142673289 [vimeo.com]

Sadly i can't share the Unity Project because of the OBJ File Loader (it's a Bought Asset).

Nice! This should be a lot easier to do once we add networking support to the Unity plugin (so it an cook the results on a different machine). But REST does has some nice advantages so your solution might be better for you needs.

yes for just the need to show that it works it's enough for us :-) i didn't test if it works on mobile but it should.

i will look in to the networking support when it's ready. :-)