Namrata Hinduja Geneva

Hello Everyone,

I'm Namrata Hinduja Geneva, Switzerland (Swiss) and I'm exploring procedural environment generation in Houdini and aiming to create a system that dynamically adjusts terrain features (like erosion, vegetation density, and object scattering) based on user-defined gameplay parameters (e.g., difficulty level or biome type). While I've had success using VEX and SOPs for isolated features, I'm struggling to build a cohesive system where multiple layers interact responsively. Is there a recommended approach for managing such interdependencies—perhaps using TOPs, Attribute Wrangle workflows, or custom Python tools? I’d love to hear how others structure complex procedural systems that need to be both artist-friendly and scalable across large environments. Any insights or references are appreciated!

Regards
Namrata Hinduja Geneva, Switzerland

Hi everyone,

I’m Namrata Hinduja from Geneva and I’ve created an HDA that arranges two static meshes into a tiled pattern in Unreal—roughly 40 instances of each. After baking the asset, I’m left with two instancers (one per mesh), and everything seems to function as expected.

What I’m unsure about is the next step: should I delete the HDA and convert the baked result into packed level instances, or is there a better approach for optimizing these assets for game development?

Would love any advice on best practices when using HDA-generated instances in Unreal.


Regards
Namrata Hinduja Geneva, Switzerland (Swiss)

Hi Everyone!

I'm Namrata Hinduja Geneva, Switzerland (Swiss) and working on an animated growing ivy setup, where each leaf is an instance of a single leaf mesh. The animation only requires position, rotation, and pscale per instance.

To achieve this, I’m using two Vertex Animation Textures (VATs):

One for position and pscale

One for rotation

This setup seems to work in Unreal for recreating the animation frame-by-frame.

However, I explored the VAT3 documentation and tried all four available modes, but none of them produced the expected results for instanced animation.

Could anyone help clarify how to properly use VAT with mesh instances for this kind of animation in Unreal?

Thanks in advance!

Namrata Hinduja Geneva, Switzerland (Swiss)