I'm working on some procedural environment creation tools using Houdini Engine, Unreal, and Substance.
The first ‘proof of concept’ tool creates small islands for a swamp-type environment, based on a user-generated spline curve in Unreal.
I also have a substance graph that generates plausible textures for any mesh the .hda produces, and I'd like to automatically generate the textures (using substance) without leaving Unreal, or manually tracking exported meshes.
The ideal workflow would look like this (everything apart from the spline creation happening automatically):
Draw spline > Generate high-res mesh > generate low-res mesh > bake utility maps for substance graph > feed maps into substance factory > generate final textures from .sbsar > apply final textures to material instance
I have each of these steps working independently, but it seems that it's not possible to wrap substances, or baking tools, inside a .hda. Manually exporting and tracking 50+ hi/lo-res meshes is going to be a pain.
Potential approaches:
1. Have sbsbaker.exe packaged as part of the .hda
Problem: Currently not possible with the current version of Houdini Engine, maybe not ever
2. Execute ‘GameDev Simple Baker’ from within Unreal, and import the resulting maps
Problem: Doesn't work from within Unreal (maybe because Houdini Engine for UE4 is lacking mantra?)
3. Automatically export high / low-res meshes from Unreal, and call Substance Automation Toolkit to bake the required maps using python
Problem: Might be possible to call .sbsbaker (through python) from within HE, but the meshes would have to be exported from Unreal automatically, which I don't think HE can do.
I assume a lot of people have tried to do this - am I missing something? If it's not currently possible, where is the smart money on the workflow that would turn up first?
Many thanks for the help