Hey guys,

Hoping that someone here will be able to help me out. I have created a terrain inside Houdini which I am able to take to UE4 as a HDA. The problem is that it is untextured and I am totally lost on how to set up multiple masks (cliff, ground, dirt etc..) that can be used as weightmaps to automatically texture the landscape inside UE4.

Worldmachine can export out these maps and you simply assign these maps to the layerinfo of the landscape, but this step seems to be skipped when importing a HDA.

Any solutions?

Hi,

When importing a Heightfield from Houdini, all the masks available on the HF will automatically be converted to landscape layers.

To create those masks, just use the various heightfield mask nodes (HF_MaskByFeature, HF_MaskNoise etc…) and import the HDA in unreal.
Upon importing the HDA, a mask called “grass” for example will be available as a landscape layer called “grass”, and be can used normally by your landscape material.

I am having an issue where I see the masks but they are greyed out and I can’t figure out how to access that data in my material.

i have some similar issues but figured out your problem yesterday.

when u see al the layers as u said grayed out, u still need to assign a material to them, join them together and put the outcome in the world material.

so in the content browser, right click and create a new material. double click on it, add a layer landscape blend node and on left details pane click on the + sign next to layers. for every layer you have, add a extra layer and double click on the “5 members” to expand it. then at layer name put in the name you gave your mask's. connect this to the base color and save the material. u could add some colors or a material to the different layers u just created. (hold 3, click somewhere in the material creation screen and u get a vertex color, put this color into the layer landscape blend node, different one for every single layer u created for your masks)

so when u saved this, and drag this newly created material to your heightfield world material it should place everything with the assigned colors/materials to your landscape.

That's correct, the plugin will create the layer infos for you, and export the splat maps with the landscape, but wont create the UE4 material for you.

Assuming you want to use a HF that has a water and grass layer for example, you need your landscape material to use these in layer blend. You can then use the “unreal_material” attribute on your hda to automatically assign the landscape material when cooking the hda.