UE4 splines have this great property that they come with rotation attributes. It's kind of as if the splines have built in manipulatable up vectors and normals.
Can we can get that info into Houdini Engine?
I have looked back at stuff that I tried to do before with Houdini Engine and UE4. (It feels like ages ago to me). In this thread: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/42946/ [sidefx.com] I discuss how to get splines with multiple points into Houdini Engine HDAs. Now I am a bit more experienced with both Houdini and Unreal 4 and so I want to clarify this stuff a bit:
In Unreal 4 you can currently create pretty neat splines by:
1. Create an empty blueprint Actor
2. Inside of the Blueprint under components -> add component -> spline
3. Place the Blueprint in the world and now you can see a small white line with two square points on it. The points can be dragged around and rightclicking on the curve adds more points etc.
Note that in the upcoming version of Unreal (4.13 or 4.14 or so) they want to improve this further. Now, I have recently worked a lot with those splines and I think they are pretty great.
Currently instead of using these splines, Houdini Engine in UE4 seems to come with its own system for creating input curves. And this system is similar but not as good as the UE4 splines. I think it is worth having another look at this system, because it is so very essential to the interaction with the tools one might build. Maybe it would be possible to cooperate, to get the new spline version Houdini Engine compatible. I hear the Unreal devs like procedural stuff. XD
Also, is there an equivalent tool in Houdini? I mean, I can make a curve in Houdini and add attributes based on curvature etc. and some ramps and maybe a multiparm block, but UE4 splines seem to be a much more elegant solution. Spline creation with built-in point attributes that react to rotating,scaling and possibly other gizmo interaction seem to be a great fit for Houdini.