Damien Pernuit

Hi everyone,

I'm pleased to let you all know that we have started to work on a version 2 of the plugin.
Similarly to what we did with version 2 of the Unity plugin, this will be a significant rewrite of the core of the plugin that will allow us to add new features more easily, and increase the overall performance and stability of the plugin.

Here are some of the major new features that we plan to add to the plugin for V2:

- Update the core architecture of the plugin, to improve stability and make the runtime module lighter, by moving the HAPI / cooking logic to a third module.
This would remove the need to bake out Houdini assets when packaging / shipping your game.

- Blueprint support, allowing Houdini assets to be embedded in blueprints in order to easily combine or preset your tools.

- PDG Asset link, that will give full access to the power of PDG and TOPs in Unreal.

For the rest, we also plan on enhancing the UX/UI of the plugin, and improve the workflows we currently have in place in the plugin. Here are some of the improvements that are planned:

- Reduce the mesh creation time to improve the reactivity of the plugin when editing placed HDAs.

- Wider generic UProperty attributes support.

- Have the ability to seamlessly move HDAs between levels.

- Support for world composition.

We do intend on making sure that version 2 supports all the existing workflows. HDAs made for version 1 of the plugin will also work with version 2 without needing to be modified, and should give similar results than they did in when used with version 1 of the plugin.

However, with the amount of changes that we intend on doing to the core of the plugin, we currently do not plan on supporting backward compatibility with version 1.
What this means is that upgrading to version 2 of the plugin will likely require that you reimport and recreate all placed HDAs in Unreal.

We currently plan on having a public beta of the new version of the plugin by the end of the year. In the meantime and until version 2 is released, please be assured that we will keep supporting version 1, though we'll be mainly focusing on major bug fixes and support for upcoming versions of UE4.

We've already compiled a list of the most requested features over the past few years, but now would be a good time for you to share with us any feature requests or needs that you might have so we can take them into account while we work on version 2 of the plugin.

Thanks

Hi,

Do you happen to be using erosion or other time dependant nodes?
If that's the case, then you should use a timeshift to set the desired frame, as the plugin doesnt change $F.

I've explained this in the docs here [www.sidefx.com].

Another possible thing, is that if your masks/layers are flat (one constant value), unreal will remove them.

Hi,

The HAPI library itself has changed a lot between 16.5 and 17.5 …
Would you happen to still be linking against the old 16.5 library?
Did you update both the headers and libraries?