Hello SideFX hive-mind.

I'm a real-time artist doing my best to learn Houdini and use it to create assets for Unreal. I'm working on some large terrain chunks and I'd like to set up 4 or 5 layers of PBR materials and blend them based on attribute values or maps. Ideally, I could get some mesh displacement from these material layers and be able to see the blend and displacement in the viewport without rendering. Basically, something like Substance Painter with the addition of of a "live" mesh and without the need to alter the actual textures that make up the materials.

From the research I've done, COPs seems to be one solution but I was intimidated by it's complexity and couldn't find tutorials/info on how to set up the planes as channels for a PBR shader.

Does anyone have any advice or thoughts on how they might approach something like this in Houdini?

Thanks so much!

create HDAs , and view those directly in unreal, mixing blends via vertex colors, why bother with cops in the first place

Thanks for your response. There are a few reasons I'd rather do this in Houdini than UE:
I want to get mesh displacement from the PBR layers, then polyreduce the final result in one place.
I'd like to be able to bake the result down to one texture set in the end so that I'm not paying for a 5 layer blend in UE.
I'd like to keep the mesh "live" so that I can change the shape (or convert between geometry and heightfield) as I'm texturing.

I would like to approach it in Houdini, but I'm not committed to using cops if there are better solutions. I found this video which describes more or less what I'd like to be able to do but there isn't much in there about the actual setup. Also, I'm unsure if it works in the live viewport or if you have to bake the textures down in order to see what the result looks like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hiAIAFao2U [www.youtube.com]