I bake some instances into a blueprint via Houdini Engine. Is it supposed to only work on an Unreal Engine with installed Houdini Engine?
- If not, what is the proper workflow for transferring the blueprint so it doesn't break?

- It is supposed to work without Houdini Engine in a compiled game, right?

When you bake blueprint it should work in UE4 without Houdini Engine. There's nothing it it that references Houdini Engine objects.

All it does is, it generates a blueprint, necessary static meshes and creates corresponding static mesh components / instanced static mesh components and attaches them to the generated blueprint. Only UE4 items.

I tried to save and then copy the baked out files in the explorer, to get them into a scene on a different computer (without Houdini Engine). It did not work. Is that not supposed to work? Could I be missing something? Would would be the right way to do a transfer between scenes?

As far as I know this should work. Baked out items have no Houdini Engine dependencies, so you should be able to transfer them. Are UE4 versions the same? What was the error? Could you provide an asset / workflow to reproduce this?

Thanks!

So, I did some extensive testing and here is my main finding:

For blueprint transfer to work, you need to copy the folder hierarchy and folder naming. Essentially the instance blueprint seems to work with absolute paths within Unreal when it is looking for the meshes that it will instance.

I am also reasonably sure that I had to add a parameter to my HDA (a parameter that I didn't even use) so that instancing via Houdini Engine works at all.

We also added a Bake-Replace feature, RFE 72336 : This will let you replace instantiated Houdini actor with a Blueprint. It will bake all the resources, create blueprint, compile it, delete instantiated Houdini actor, instantiate blueprint (while keeping the original Houdini actor transform).