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rickvdvulkaan
I'm not really familiar with unreal engine, but it looks very promising. Before i really start to
dig in, i was wondering if it's possible to create a scene, materials, and everything inside houdini and pretty much "replace" karma with the UE5 renderer without too much hassle? In the perfect world, i don't really want to touch unreal engine, i just want to make use of the render engine for motion graphic work. Is it possible?
frBorges34
Your question is too broad and generic to answer clearly, but globally no.
Yes because you can create all of your geometry inside H, and import everything inside UE, through the classical "universal" formats (fbx, obj, dae, etc...), as long as you convert it to geometry, or through Houdini engine (I think). But you obviously can't transfer all your material from one dcc to another, and even less from one render engine to another. That's the case from Karma to Lumen, but that would be the case for every other dcc and render engines ! Lumen (UE5 render engine) doesn't work in the same way as Karma. Actually every render engine has its proper way of dealing with materials and shaders (and even material created with redshift in houdini can't be directly exported to another DCC that use Redshift, like C4D for example). You'll have to rebuild your material inside UE5, and even with that way, some functionalities will have to be rebuilt in the manner of lumen (as far as I know, Lumen doesn't accept classic displacement and tesselation, because of the new nanite system that replace it).
From what I understand, you would like to use Lumen as a simple external renderer, it's way more complicated than that, and therefore globally not possible to do without a pretty big rebuilding work (shaders in particular) inside UE5.
More generally, there is no magic way to transfer shaders from any render engines to another without a work of conversion. No silver bullet here.

PS : check here [www.sidefx.com], the combination of H and UE5 is presented in more details
rickvdvulkaan
I was indeed looking for a "silver bullet", and in a perfect world UE5 as an external renderer, which i didn't really expect to be possible, but thanks for clearing that up. Although, what now crosses my mind; could materialX come into place here? Not sure if unreal supports it, or has plans for that. I get that each render engine could make things look completely different.

anyway, it's the only thing that makes me going back to blender for quick renders with eevee. I wish there was something like that for Houdini. for a second i thought the unreal engine could be a solution, maybe even better than eevee.
raincole
rickvdvulkaan
I was indeed looking for a "silver bullet", and in a perfect world UE5 as an external renderer, which i didn't really expect to be possible, but thanks for clearing that up. Although, what now crosses my mind; could materialX come into place here? Not sure if unreal supports it, or has plans for that. I get that each render engine could make things look completely different.

anyway, it's the only thing that makes me going back to blender for quick renders with eevee. I wish there was something like that for Houdini. for a second i thought the unreal engine could be a solution, maybe even better than eevee.

Unity and Unreal have many advantages over Eevee. They're generally faster. They support RTX. They have real-time composition in the viewport. UE5 also has real-time global illumination.

The advantage of Eevee is that it's a part of Blender, so it's easier if you need to edit the mesh.
frBorges34
rickvdvulkaan
I was indeed looking for a "silver bullet", and in a perfect world UE5 as an external renderer, which i didn't really expect to be possible, but thanks for clearing that up. Although, what now crosses my mind; could materialX come into place here? Not sure if unreal supports it, or has plans for that. I get that each render engine could make things look completely different.

anyway, it's the only thing that makes me going back to blender for quick renders with eevee. I wish there was something like that for Houdini. for a second i thought the unreal engine could be a solution, maybe even better than eevee.

Never tried Materialx, so I don't know !

IMHO, it really depends on what you need/intend to produce. Houdini is an absolutely wonderfull software, if you can afford Redshift, or Renderman, it can be almost as fast as Eeve (and everything else being equal, it will be fastest than creating in Houdini and exporting/shading in UE). But if you just intend to do motion graphic work, I'd stick to C4D or alike, for simpler work it's simply easier and fastest, you'll have all the premade tools already ready, while in H you'll have to build them. And maybe I'm wrong, cause I'm not an UE specialist, but I have the feeling that UE is not at all the weapon of choice to do motion graphics.
rickvdvulkaan
And maybe I'm wrong, cause I'm not an UE specialist, but I have the feeling that UE is not at all the weapon of choice to do motion graphics.

I already use the openGL renderer a lot lately, and with some mostion blur, ambient occlusion and some post work it is mostly already looking pretty good for things like funky text animations. I'm pretty sure that the UE5 engine would be even better. see this example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g0UX1xGGgs&ab_channel=UnrealEngine [www.youtube.com]

I really prefer houdini over C4D by the way because of the way houdini works with nodes, i just speak that language a little better. and there are some great tools in houdini for mograph (also MOPS). I do some VFX work as well here and there.

Anyway, i think redshift might also be a really good choice.
Drasko Ivezic
It depends how you look at it. If get used to use UE as your main layout/lighting/surfacing tool, then yes. You can use Houdini to build all the assets that are not possible to build in UE, bring those over to UE and make the final work there, camera, compositing, rendering. If Houdini is your main tool for layout/lighting/surfacing, then no. UE can be handy because of the nesting sequences, so you can make more intuitive editing choices, tune the camera and all that in the real lighting environment, real time, while working in Houdini requires less intuitive work on previs and spend more time on fine tuning the final render. So, it is also a personal preference of your workflow.
ajz3d
raincole
Unity and Unreal have many advantages over Eevee. They're generally faster. They support RTX. They have real-time composition in the viewport. UE5 also has real-time global illumination.
Not on all platforms. At the moment one won't get much benefit (if any) from RTX cores in UE5 if he's on GNU/Linux. At least that's what I've read. Reportedly, on GNU/Linux Lumen is software only, and Nanite doesn't work at all. How bad it really is, I guess I'm about to find out, as I'm still compiling the engine.

And Unity? Last time I checked, it also still didn't support ray-tracing with RTX on GNU/Linux.

Some people suspect that it's because of Linux GPU drivers lacking full API that is available on Windows, and not from the lack of will of Unreal/Unity developers to implement a complete RTX support. If that's true, I believe we can only "thank" GPU chip manufacturers for that.
Hatchery
What about setting everything up in Houdini and using USD, can UE5 support USD and forgive my ignorance (I really dont know anything about LOPS and USD at the moment) but is there a potential pipeline there? can this be done using houdini engine? indie?
Sorry I know very little about this area but it's just peaked my interest!
osong
native UE tools of scene layout are more efficient than USD i/o

generally speaking, you will be better off actually setting up everything in UE, and inserting Houdini in the gaps, not the other way around
bollili
Redshift RT is in beta and it is promising. As you can use redshift in solaris right in the viewport, maybe this is as close you can get for realtime preview. And for many needs it maybe already enough in terms on quality.
ikoon
After few weeks of learning USD and Solaris and working on my freelancers Karma pipeline, I am also curious: can "Mograph" Houdinist or "Virtual production" Houdinist profit from USD? Does the learning of proper USD practices help me transfer the scene to Unreal?

What can I expect now from USD, as regards transferring data from Houdini to Unreal Engine? (Or in the near future, please?)

I know that the needs and rules of proper Game development are different. I work in the Event industry, so, many sequences can be prerendered (the opening animations and the jingles and wipes don't have to be real-time).

- can I export USD geometry from Houdini to UE (animated, changing topology)?
- including instances (animated)?
- lights and cameras (animated)?
- does MaterialX get translated, at least basic attributes and textures?
- what about vdb or volume sequences?
- or, do you transfer Nulls from Houdini to UE and then bind lights, cam, or geo, niagara positions etc. in UE?


Thank you very much for any tips or insights.
ikoon
Matt Estela has nice tricks and summary on this topic written here:
https://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php?title=Unreal#USD [www.tokeru.com]

Here is an example of a scene transferred from Solaris to UE:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Houdini/comments/uc6hph/solaris_to_ue5_via_usd_running_on_gtx_1070_laptop/ [www.reddit.com]

I will do tests asap and post any findings here. Still, I am completely new in this area. Any links or tips are highly appreciated, so I don't reinvent a wheel. Thanks a lot!
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