I am working on a building generator that utilizes UE4 Assets to build Houses. I am using Object Merges that have their Object Inputs exposed so I can just drag and drop Assets in UE4 into the Parameter. Then I copy those to the points that I have specified. This works perfectly so far. However, this builds really repetitive Houses, as it only takes one wall asset as an input, which I would love to randomize a bit. When I add another Object to the Object Merge inside Unreal (so that this particular Object merge uses 2 Inputs) it will merge both of the Assets to all places.
Is there a way that it only scatters one of the Assets per Point instead of both? So that I am able to randomize which one of the two it scatters.
I know there is the way of using the unreal_instance with an attribute randomize afterwards, however that is really not user friendly and I would prefer to use the drag and and drop functionality of the object merge.
When using multiple objects in a geometry inputs, the meshes are merged together in the input object. You could separate them afterwards using the unreal_input_mesh_name attribute.
You also have the option to pack each input object before merging, which will create a packed primitive for each input object.
However, I would actually recommend using the unreal_instance attribute over geometry inputs for this. When instancing, this would let you use the original mesh in unreal, whereas geometry inputs actually send the data to houdini for processing, which will likely result in the source mesh being duplicated.
Alternatively, you could try instancing one simple object in Houdini, and use the HDA's instanced inputs to replace the instanced objects by multiple variations.
ie: instantiate a single wall panel in Houdini (could be a simple box) after cooking, you can then replace the mesh that is instanced by another one, or add new variations to be used.
