Hello,
I am trying to get a character to dissolve in Unreal from Houdini and I am finding it quite hard to find a way to go about this. The thing which is tripping me up is that the dissolving effect HAS to happen in Houdini, not in Unreal. I am thinking vertex animation is the way to go since Alembic does NOT like deforming surfaces at all.
https://imgur.com/a/49gS55s [imgur.com] (image with character)
Here is an example of what I am trying to transplant into Unreal. I dissolve the model using a color map and a delete node (delete by expression).
Now, the main problem I am having is getting the thing into an Unreal vertex animation. Whenever I try to create a vertex animation using online tutorials something goes wrong and the whole thing doesn't work. The closest I have gotten is using an example .hip to try to run through the workflow on a prebuilt system. The results are below:
https://imgur.com/a/49gS55s [imgur.com] (image with fracturing pigs)
The pink pig is mine while the white one is a premade one that came with the file. Notice how mine is completely off but the workflow is correct. I narrowed this down to the min/max bounds since all of the vertex faces seem to fit correctly into the individual chunks but the chunks are in the incorrect places.
How do I get correct coordinates? Am I doing something wrong in this regard? Should I use a fluid or a rigid vertex animation for the character?
I am curious if this is the best way of dissolving the character. If there's a more intuitive method it would be great to know about it.
Thanks in advance,
Arjan