what did you think about Unreal Niagara presentation!
I really liked what they showed off. Niagara has a few things that are very reminiscent of Houdini:
- Modules are node based - Geometry spreadsheet
More interestingly in the middle of the presentation it was even said that SideFX and Epic were working together and will basically have a own format that lets you export your things from Houdini and still have access to the data in Unreal thanks to that format. You can see it in the presentation.
I am happy that they kept some of their stack format. As much as i love Houdini it would not make sense to have a wanna be duplicate in Unreal. And even today you can do very cool things in cascade!
Tell us what you thought of it!
I really cant wait for the first Unreal 4.20 preview to play around with it!
Mike and Damien did a lot of work with Epic to figure out the data interface stuff.
I think it's an amazing runtime complement to Houdini. If you just want things swirling around in runtime it's incredibly powerful. There's quite a few of these node based solutions for fx now and it makes perfect sense.
Most particle systems rely on gpu particles, that get controlled with shader code. And most engines already generate shader code from node graphs.
Cascade was written before gpu particles and the control you had over them was pretty limited so they needed something new
The way it plays with Houdini is if you want to anything more complex that you might want to bake. The example of an rbd triggering the spawning of debris and sprites is one of the examples.
very interesting presentation from the talk it seems that the data interface format is just CSV, is it really the most efficient way to do that? I suppose if I want to send a lot of attributes to Unreal from my sim for a lot of frames, ascii CSV file may become heavy and possibly slow to read/stream by Unreal, is it somehow cached/converted on Unreal side to more native realtime format? Why not encoding data into textures as for some other stuff?
We ingest the CSV and turn it into a more easily digestible unreal asset type under the hood.
That being said, IMO we should be importing all different types of data from Houdini and allowing the user to choose the interface on the Unreal end. Encoding as textures is great for the GPU but the data table might be better for the CPU. Since we have CPU/GPU parity it makes sense for the user to be able to load balance as necessary for their needs.
So cool of you to swing by, Wyeth! That was a really great presentation! I am really excited for Niagara - and from the looks of it you guys found a really nice balance between graph and stack. I cant wait for the first 4.20 previews to play around with it!
