Hey everyone,

A few of my VFX students have been testing out the Houdini to Niagara pipeline the past couple of weeks, specifically using point caches, but they’ve run into some issues with the HoudiniNiagara plugin. After checking it out, I realized the current Niagara modules in the plugin are not yet beginner friendly.

So, I’ve been working on extending the plugin by improving the Niagara modules and creating some clearer demo content to help showcasing specific behaviors.

I’ve put together StormHoudiniNiagara, which is a separate plugin from the main to avoid conflicts. You'll have to install the HoudiniNiagara and SideFX_Labs plugins as well. I’ll keep maintaining it as long as it’s useful.

Releases, install instructions, and planning are being updated on my Notion page for the project:
http://storm-houdini-niagara.notion.site [storm-houdini-niagara.notion.site]

Robbie Storm
Lecturer of Visual Arts | VFX Art & Tech Art
Games | Academy for AI, Games and Media
Breda University of Applied Sciences



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What’s New:
- Simplified Niagara modules for point caches, cutting down the number of modules from 4 to 2, with more complex options for sampling and applying point caches.
- Added a demo room that shows how the modules work with different point cache setups to create various effects.

What’s Next:
- Keep polishing the Niagara modules.
- Expand the demo room with more examples.
- Add high-quality sample assets as examples.
- Include the Houdini source files for everything in the plugin.

Minor update

- I've altered the plugin to, instead of being standalone, requiring SideFX's HoudiniNiagara and the FX_Labs plugin. This ensures it's more future proof and allows me to use the Labs pipelines in the sample assets. At first it was standalone in the case I needed to modify the C++ code. We'll see if that will be necessary in the future. It's uploaded as 0.2 and I've immediately deprecated 0.1 as that is now not compatible anymore.
- I've added a conditional spawning example based on an attribute in Houdini, finishing the basic samples for now. Next up will be actual demo's of VFX.

Replying for safekeeping good work btw

Hello, would this work with UE 5.6.0 as well?

kilian89
Hello, would this work with UE 5.6.0 as well?

It should! I purposefully didn't include any C++ code. Let me know if you find it not working then I can take a look! I have not checked if the HoudiniNiagara plugin itself got updated.

hey Robbie! thanks fot the tool.
I'm facing the same issue with it as with the basic plugin. When I speed up the simulation inside Houdini with a retime node,then cache it and export, Niagara doesn't kill some of the particles (although attributes age and life are there) and the whole simulation becomes a mess. It looks like these is some velocity threshold above which Niagara doesn't want to kill them properly.