Hi all,

While setting up our pipeline we encountered multiple issues with the ue4 plugin and generally workflow issues.
For one particular issue we created a bug report, #96599 ( btw there is no bug category for the ue4 plugin, which might be handy)

The main issue seems to be that houdini doesn't like to work with multiple landscape actors. Whether in World Composition or normal level streaming.

One example is scatter tools. We want to place one scatter tool for each landscape tile so they can be properly streamed in and out. However when selecting the landscapeproxy as an input, Houdini gets confused and places all the instances with an offset, and not only from that particular tile but the whole combined landscape. This part could be fixed by opening each streaming level separate and placing the tool there, manually fixing the offset and saving. This fix stops working as soon as you want to isolate your scattering to a specific landscape layer. Since we believe it then starts to look at the landscape layer info file. Which the world composition only uses one of for the whole landscape.

The other issue is that Houdini allows us now to export tiled landscapes as streaming proxies(Which is nice). However there is no way to place the different tiles in separate levels without breaking the link.
Another thing is that ue4 creates an empty landscape “parent” actor when you import world composition the traditional way. Is there a way maybe that Houdini can do this? I think there are a lot of things ue4 does behind the screens that we miss by trying to brute force world composition.

I hope this is something they can fix easily but I feel it's something fundamental on how Houdini interacts with ue4.

If anyone has tips about this workflow involving world composition and procedural large world creation in general. I would be super thankful if you could share these. Since we are a bit stuck atm.

Thanks,


Flore

Create a empty landscape “parent” actor in main level，and create landscape stream proxy in SubLevels, is ue4 workflow.
But it likely houdini want use self workflow.
If you want use ue4 workflow, you can modify the code yourself.
I saw many people ask this question in forum.
Because of the houdini engine for ue4 is not stable, still in development, so these is some chaos.
Maybe houdini should gave a detail docment about the workflow, and the community can give opinion to the workflow.
The workflow is very important, maybe we should make sure the workflow is acceptable by people in community, rather than first develope the function.

And a suggestion to houdini engine developer, i found use file to export ue4 data to houdini, it's much simple than use hapi to create the houdini node in the hda.

The scattering issue on streaming proxies was fixed in 17.5.260 btw
Thanks for the fix!