Since this comes up quite a bit, I thought a quick post about it might help those curious about this feature, or if having trouble getting it working.

The Bake Animation functionality can be found on the Inspector window of the root GameObject when an HDA is instantiated in the Unity scene (i.e. HoudiniAssetOTL component). What it produces is an Unity legacy animation clip containing keyframed data of the object's transform that has been animated in Houdini. Note that currently the object must reside in a subnet in the HDA. It will not work on objects outside a subnet at this time.

Here is a simple way to try it out:

1. In Houdini, create a SOP node, and animate it's transform. Make the SOP node as part of a subnet (there is a Create subnet from selected option in the network editor's top menu).

2. Save as digital asset.

3. Load HDA into Unity, and drag into scene.

4. Expand the Bake Animations section in the Inspector for the HoudiniAssetOTL component. Set the time and samples per second according to how you set up in Houdini. Hit Bake Animation.

5. Hit Play

Your child object will now have an Animation component, and will auto-play in play mode.

If you are animating vertices or changing topology, the Vertex Animation Texture tool will be the right one to use instead. See here: https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/unity-shaders-for-vertex-animation-export-tools/ [www.sidefx.com]

I am just learning and trying to figure this out. I have an animation in Houdini but when I export as a Digital Asset I cannot find the animation. You mention the HoudiniAssetOTL component. Do I need to do something to create this as I can't find it anywhere?

Thanks

I'm having the same issue, could you please clarify on this? I have the HDA selected in Unity but see no animation options.

Anyone have any idea on this? Still struggling to find an easy way to get animations from Houdini to Unity. I'm not seeing animation options in the bake settings, not finding a way to do it with session sync either.