Joel Aelwyn

One thing to bear in mind: if you're talking about *large* landscapes, specifically large enough to walk a decent distance in rather than just an FPS level sized “landscape”, you really, really, *really* want to investigate the UE4 Landscape system (as opposed to Terrain, which is effectively obsolete and replaced by Landscape).

However, using Houdini to build things that can be “painted onto” the large-scale landscape would potentially make a great deal of sense, although getting it to really work well for the more complex algorithms might require a deeper understanding of the technical aspects of landscape materials.

For smaller stuff, on the other hand, the two end up becoming relatively similar in terms of gross organization (placement of items); anywhere that it is a wash, you probably want UE4 blueprints simply because it understands how to cook them more efficiently (among other things).

However, UE4 has very little concept of anything beyond the basic functions for building procedural materials; Houdini has a large advantage there.

damian
Thanks for bringing this up. We'll fix it for the next nightly.

In general though, our recommendation is that if you want to compile the plugin from source that you do it using the source code from our Github page:

https://github.com/sideeffects/HoudiniEngineForUnreal [github.com]

It should not have this problem and if you ever want to contribute anything it makes that process easier.

Update: This has been fixed as of 14.0.296.

Conveniently answering one of my forthcoming questions, regarding whether there was a git repo available, since the phrasing of several things seemed to imply there might be one, but I didn't find any reference to where it would be (I may well have just overlooked it, though).

Will arrange to shuffle things around and point at that in another day or two, with any luck, and check it out.

Will be reporting via normal channels, but putting this out so that anyone else who runs into it can avoid having to dig through and figure out why it happens – especially since it is not particularly obvious what is wrong, based on where it fails.

On line 32 of HoudiniEngine/Source/HoudiniEngine/HoudiniEngine.Build.cs change

string HFSPath = “Ccygwin64/home/prisms/builder-new/Nightly14.0/dev/hfs”;

to

String HFSPath = “”;

(this causes the auto-detection to kick in properly, or at least appears to)