Gang:

I’m trying to get a USD-to-Unreal Engine workflow working, but I’m having trouble with materials getting lost in translation. In particular, I’ve tried using MaterialX (which is experimental in Unreal, granted) without much luck, as it seems to load and use some textures but not others. Should I be using something besides MaterialX? “Classic” principled shaders? USD Preview shaders? Any suggestions or pointers to resources would be welcome, I can’t seem to find any documentation (Houdini or Unreal) on what’s supposed to work, or what isn’t.

Cheers,
Tim

For anyone interested … using Houdini 19.5 and Unreal Engine 5.3, the best choice for materials that I can see is to use a classic Houdini principled shader without any additional VOPs in your material library. With that, I was able to reliably use the usual PBR textures and have them show up in UE. When using a MaterialX standard surface, the basic surface parameters (base color, etc) were visible in UE, but most of my textures weren’t imported. Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Tim

I've only briefly tested this, but it's possible to assign native UE materials to USD assets. They need a prim attribute pointing to the location of the UE material in the content library. This allows you to use native UE materials vs hoping your USD materials get translated successfully.

daviddeacon
I've only briefly tested this, but it's possible to assign native UE materials to USD assets. They need a prim attribute pointing to the location of the UE material in the content library. This allows you to use native UE materials vs hoping your USD materials get translated successfully.

Hey David, any chance you can expand on this. I'm trying to do this right now by creating an 'unrealMaterial' attribute with a String value = to the path to the Unreal Material. But I can't seem to get the import into Unreal to recognize this and apply the material.

Nevermind, got it working.

Just wanted to say thank you MorganMcD, after struggling with a couple of hours myself your file was the one that did the trick, now I can move on with my life.