Export houdini to unreal engine

[juanandonly]

Hello, people of OD force,

I am a noob at Houdini only a year of experience with the software but I am having fun and enjoy learning it. Now I am doing a short film for university and I made a few different effects. I have accomplished the effects I wanted but the problem is I cannot seem to be able to export them, I tried, alembic, FBX and HDA but none of them works.  I was planning on rendering on unreal so that's where I want import them but I can't figure it out how to do this. 

 

More info 

The effects I have done are two volumes sop and an rbd fracture. I believe I am doing something wrong with the fracture but the cloud man and the volumetric fog might be because they don't have any geometry but I am not sure. My option or best bet is try to work out hdas or just rebuild all the effects in unreal or Maya or even do them in compositing.

This is why I need you people of the internet to help another human being out, please.

I'll be leaving the hip files so you can check it out and understand the situation better :

fog_effect.hip

test_smoke_3.hip

fracture_judgement_export.hip

and the files I am using in the scenes

needed files.rar

All your wisdom is appreciated

Thank you

Juanandonly

[sant0s81]

Did you try exporting something very simple?
Drop a box, create digital asset and check, if you can import the HDA.

If that doesnt work, you have to check if you are using the right versions of Houdini and UE4.

You cannot use VDB in UE4 yet.

For the fractures check:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xUAueQigbo

Also check the YT Channel from Houdini, there are quite alot tutorials about Houdini <-> UE4.

 

Edited December 9, 2020 by sant0s81

[Atom]

I don't know of any direct pipeline for Unreal to render volumes from Houdini. The Unreal Niagara particle system can accept a Houdini generated point cache to drive the Unreal volumetrics.

You may want to search for tutorials on Houdini to Niagara.

I'm in the process of trying this pipeline, myself, so I don't have a solution yet.

Houdini fractures and Unreal Alembic imports don't like each other. This is because Houdini will generate n-gons. Unreal can only import triangles and quadrilaterals. I use this setup to detect and convert n-gons into triangles.

The bad candidates are detect inside an attributeVop running over primitives.

i@group_candidates = 0;
int num = primvertexcount(0, @primnum);
if(num > 4) {
    // Not acceptable by Unreal.
    i@group_candidates = 1;
}

 

ap_rbd_fixup_for_unreal_alembic.hiplc

Edited December 9, 2020 by Atom