Getting Started with Houdini Engine for UE4 | SideFX | HIVE Workshop

good day my name is robert mcgee i'm here today to talk about getting started with houdini engine for unreal this is technology that allows you to work with houdini under the hood inside the unreal editor this presentation is designed for game developers who are new to houdini who want to learn about the unreal engine plug-in that we have for working this way so the agenda today is we're going to start by talking about procedural assets for artist level designers so these are assets that exist that you can use in unreal to create game art the second part is going to how you create your own versions of those assets using houdini and its node-based workflow and the third thing we're going to do is learn how to install and license the technology and just a little bit about how to set it up properly if you go and work with this on your own okay so the first thing is assets that already exist and how to work with them in unreal and we're going to start specifically with a series called the unreal starter kit which is available on the side effects website you go to the get menu under the content library and this is a collection of assets that come with each come with the tutorial and you can learn how to install them and work with them and we'll take a little preview of a couple of them today so here we are in unreal and there's the houdini engine menu which means it's been installed properly and we start a session there and then we have a folder here with the starter kit so i downloaded it and sold it into this project so here's our first asset which is a tree now at first you look at it and go okay maybe this is just like any other tree you bring it in and it's a sort of a static asset but this is a procedural asset so what that means is you've got control over different aspects of it like for instance here we can grab these points on this curve and by manipulating them we can change the look of that asset right here in the 3d view so the way that this works is that as you manipulate an asset here under the hood houdini engine is processing houdini and giving you the result that we have here so this is something that works inside the editor here it's not a run time you don't have the ability to manipulate these things in runtime but they do help you as you're creating your levels and design your art so here you see some parameters that are available like for instance we could get rid of the leaves and just work with a tree that uh that has the um stock here so let's go and put another one in um let's bring in the wall tool so again this comes in um you know looking like an ordinary asset but we have a whole bunch of options which we can get access to here on the menu and you can see these parameters here so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to work with stones uh instead of the plain one let's go and add a door so that allows us to put a door into the middle of this of this we can change this the overall size so all this again you're manipulating it here in unreal and under the hood a houdini is being processed to generate the geometry the way that you need it so now we're going to go into the border and we're going to change the border to stone to match what we've been doing uh we did with the rest of it and we don't need it everywhere so let's get rid of from the bottom from the right and from the left so we only have it at the top and around the door so all of these options are built into these digital assets to allow you to customize a particular asset to the needs of your game rather than it being a static asset which you know you'd have to go back and remodel if you wanted something to be changed all that's here we can even bend this wall that's a built-in feature of the asset and then we can sort of rotate it into place move it into place and there we go we'll have a nice little sort of round wall in the corner and you know as you're developing your level at any point you can step back and continue to make edits in this you put it in place decide you know what i'd like to make it a little wider and maybe make it almost as tall as the wall that we have here and then move that into place now as an unreal artist or level designer i'm working with this tool i don't actually have any idea i mean if it didn't have the little logo there houdini engine the fact that houdini's involved in this that's irrelevant i mean at the moment this just feels like i'm working with unreal i'm just adding and enhancing my experience and unreal using these procedural assets and that's that's good because it means that the unreal level designer or artist is able to use houdini engine without changing the way they work they don't have to learn a new interface they don't have to learn houdini at all they can just take advantage of these tools and how they work inside their more familiar environment so this is another editor this is another asset rather and what's not different about this one is we can actually apply it to something else so what we're going to do is instead of having that rock floating in space we're going to select these three pieces of geometry and they're going to become the rocks and the rocks sort of go and encompass that so even though it's positioned over here it's actually looking at that geometry so you can have a digital asset interact with geometry that you have in unreal and have them um connect in this kind of way so that's pretty exciting so now let's just test the level out go around we can run around and there the assets are so essentially once you press play or you you turn your you build your game then these assets become baked into the into the environment and they work there that's why when the assets are made they have to be made using techniques that are game friendly and you know later when we learn how to make our own asset we're going to talk a little bit about some of the things there things like instancing and you know maybe some poly reduction things to make sure that it's game friendly uh also you can include things like collision geometry and and other effects now here we're going to take that tree and we're going to bake it um so one of the things is not only will the assets get baked when you run the game but you have the ability to say you know what i don't need it procedural the whole time so what i'm going to do is i'm going to to bake it so you'll have your live procedural one that we're controlling here and then you have the baked one which is a little more static now what we're going to do here is we're going to bring in a placement tool so this is another digital asset that comes with the starter kit and it just says you know what i want to place a bunch of objects along a line so i'm just going to go and fix that line we're going to move that line over here and let's uh move that last corner over here now right now um you've just got a bunch of little boxes uh representing this so what you're going to do is let's just change the spacing on this let's go more like 3 meters they're so a little tight maybe let's go five meters great now once we have that what we have is um the instance object so there's that little box that i was talking about you can actually replace that with other content so we can go here to the houdini engine go to the bake section and we can take that baked tree and put it on and now we have a whole line of trees being manipulated and along the way they're being rotated and and and so on you can actually go we probably don't need the original one just delete the original one so now we have the baked trees we have the one live procedural tree and then we have a line of trees here uh that you can maybe manipulate like this uh you can also um control other things like their rotation and and and different aspects of them along the way and that's uh i think if you really wanted to you could um twist them around at the end maybe do a full twist just uh you know if it was different kind of asset you might want to do that uh it doesn't really work for this case but you've got other kinds of controls so you can put a bunch of elements along the line telephone poles or pylons or you know whatever and you'll be able to control them uh using this uh this asset this placement asset that comes with the starter kit so you've seen we've got a nice variety of tools within the starter kit and so anyone working with unreal engine is able to use any assets that are available to enhance their game and to help them build their 3d environment and there we go so the other aspect of this is how are these assets created where do they come from how do they exist so we can take a look at that by building a simple asset we're going to build this tombstone in houdini and we're going to go through a lot of different possibilities of features that you can add to your tool to make it work well within the unreal environment then after that we're going to build a small little graveyard using a nice variety of those those gray tombstones that we build using the initial asset so if you're going to use houdini it's good to understand the nature of houdini and how it supports us in this process of creating digital assets for unreal so the key is that when you do something houdini everything you create becomes a node and these nodes get connected to build networks each network defines a recipe and the recipe can be used over and over again and networks can be packaged up into digital assets so what this means is that while you're working you create a bunch of nodes and into this network you can package them up into a single node that gets stored on disk in a file called an hda file you then build a high-level interface for that by taking parameters from inside the network and promoting them to the top level of that main asset then you can take that back into houdini and it acts like any other tool the interface is available and you're able to manipulate it like any other tool in houdini as a matter of fact a lot of the tools that that come with houdini are actually digital assets put together by the developers now what if you want to go and do the same thing and take one of these procedural digital assets and put them into unreal well theoretically that doesn't work by default because unreal doesn't recognize that kind of asset so what you do is you use the houdini engine plug-in and that plug-in allows you to import hda files or hit digital asset files and then the unreal engine will present you with the interface which we just saw with some of those starter kit assets that we created we brought them in we imported them we were able to manipulate them and control their interface so this is sort of the ecosystem by which these digital assets work so here we are in houdini we're going to start by just building a box we're going to take that and change its size to make it a little tall and thin and this will be the base of our tombstone now we go down here's the what's known as the geometry level in houdini we're able to select these edges and we're going to poly bubble them and you'll notice that as we do this the two actions we've taken so far the creation of the box and the poly bevel create nodes and they're there in that network there and each of those nodes has parameters and manipulating those parameters and this sort of comes back to what we talked about earlier about this node network that we're going to be able to package up into an asset so we also put an expression in here to make sure that the the tomb is always sitting on the top of the ground so no matter how tall we make it or any changes we make it'll always sit on the ground now the next thing we want to do is we want to select these two nodes and package them up so we're going to make a digital asset out of this we give it a name tombstone we put it into the proper folder so accept to put that into our project folder and it thinks about a second and then it's going to build bring up a type properties window we won't do anything with that for the moment but we're going to go and import this asset into unreal we're just going to go into the houdini engine folder we can store our assets in here import hda tombstone and there we go now when we bring that over um if we were to just click on that there i got a nice position there okay if we go and look at that there are no controls on this all we see is our transformation ability at the moment this is acting very much the same as as any static asset you might bring in to make it procedural we need to um promote some ideas some some parameters uh from the lower level so we're going to take this box we're going to bring the size of the box because the size of of the tombstone is probably a good starting point and then we're going to bring in the bevel the amount of bevel that we have there and we're actually going to change the name of this to corner corner bevel just so it's a little more understandable to the artist when they work with this asset so once we've got that we see there's an interface there in houdini and we can rebuild this asset here and that same interface becomes available in the unreal engine if we want to change that to 1.2 that can go up we want to play with the corner bevel to get a little more um like this and there we go so very nice simple control over what's going on and every time we manipulate the parameters here in unreal under the hood houdini is is processing and giving the result back so that's a very simple thing so let's build up this asset add some complexity to it so we can really get a feel for how far this sort of proceduralism can go in this case so we're going in and we're refusing the points that we had before we're now going to add um what's called a group create we want to be able to create a group that's just the front face of of this so we use a the normals in the direction of negative one zero zero to specifically find that front face that means it doesn't matter what's going on with this asset we'll always just find that that front face now once we have that when we go to poly extrude we can go and say use the front group that one face and only poly extrude that particular element so this is how within a procedural network we start to get control because we narrow things down to what we need we only need things coming from the front and then we'll paul extrude that now when we paul extruded it we created a second group um and you can see it here so we can create a thing called extrude front and then in this second group here our polyextrude we can use that again another group so that that's the only thing that we probably extrude so you can build these relationships within the network to get what you want now it's looking like something strange is going on there the fuse earlier isn't quite doing what it was meant to do so we're going to go back to that and just maybe tighten that a little bit 0.01 yes there we go that's now that extrudes nicely so we have an extrusion and we have an inset and these are all things that we could promote to the top level of the asset we're not going to right now but anything we have in here could be promoted up and that's part of what's nice about building these assets is you decide what kind of control you want the artist to have do you want them to control the size yes do you want them control the amount of bevel uh maybe not maybe that's something you want to do yourself and you you want to just leave that built into the asset so we're now going to add a second box in this will be sort of the base of the tomb and we're going to put that into down there now so we've got the the main part of the tomb going above the ground and this part going below we're now going to merge the geometry and then we'll offset them just a little bit so that the base is popping up from the ground but we're allowing a lot of the the base to go under the ground because um we don't know what the landscape is going to be like and and and where the position exactly is going to be of the tomb um when we do a graveyard later so this just gives us a little bit of of something to work with now let's save that uh what we've done so far and let's um rebuild the asset and it's only showing the base now why is it only showing the base well it turns out that we have our display flag on the wrong node we have it on that one over there this is a common mistake while working with assets we need that to be on the on the end but there is a second solution that's important in houdini and that is the creation of something called the output node so what this will do is once you've got an output node that will always be the output no matter where your display flag is so my display flag is on the box it doesn't matter because i when i save this is the output node will give us the proper geometry at the end so if you're building an asset it's always good to use an output node to make sure that it doesn't matter where your display flag is so there we go that that brings us everything we've got so far the next thing we want to do is just add some more detail into this make this um you know a little softer right now it's looking a little hard edged especially if we're supposed to be a an old weathered tomb so we're going to add a feature in here called attribute noise um attributes are a big part of how houdini does things and we're going to put in a p scale with an amplitude of 2.2 now this isn't scaling anything at the moment but when we go to poly bevel here we can actually um use that scaling to help us and what you'll see is instead of getting a nice straight bevel uh you're getting now we're not seeing the bevel right now because we've got the display flag on the wrong thing but we'll fix that second so put the splay flag on poly bevel and you'll see instead of being a nice even poly bubble it's a little random now part of um part of making this look better will be just let's go in and maybe make a polygon mesh so we got a little more detail now when we first do that it does everything um it but paulie bevels every edge but you can actually go in and there's an option for getting rid of the flat edges so we're only doing the corners again this is nice about houdini there's procedural options that just analyze things and and get you what you want so we're going to take that same noise and we're going to add that to the tomb itself and we copied and pasted what we had before so we didn't have to uh do it again the only thing is this is these are not the appropriate values for the the tomb so we're gonna want to make some changes there so we're going to change that to maybe 0.012 so it's a little bit less of a poly bevel um change that normal angle so that it it it flows properly through there doesn't uh do some of those curvy pieces and um let's turn off the display so that's what it looks like right now there's maybe a little more detail in there than we would want uh so you can go back and again this was nice about the procedural networks houdini you can go and change that change the amplitude and you can change the number divisions to one and there you go so now you've got your that set up it's a little softer a little more round and if we save that asset we can go back to unreal and just see what that what that feels like there and there we go it's a little softer and that's working a little better for us and we just just change that to make that a little more round now the next thing we want to do is we want to add a material so we're going to take one of these starter starter content support concrete and put that on there and actually i don't think that's the right place the right place to put it would be if you're looking at the tombstone here there's a place for a material there so let's just let's just put that in there now once we have that we should see a material but we don't and the reason is we don't have uvs so we can continue to further enhance this asset by adding uvs right here into the network method for creating them we're going to add a normal just to make sure the normals are good on this particular asset then we're going to do an auto seam and so there's the uvs there's nothing right now but we've created some seams on the geometry and those seams will allow us to break up the geometry now it's not using the seams right now the seams generated a group called seams and we just gotta select that there we go that breaks that down a little bit more and then we can redistribute the parts using a uv layout node and um we'll just change that to buy island position and we get a nice uv distribution there and we're going to go save the asset and we can go to unreal and when we rebuild the asset now you'll see that the material looks proper because it's taking advantage of the uvs that were part of that texture so everything you need to do within a procedural asset set up your uvs things that are necessary for your game art to work inside the game editor those can be built here into the asset and they are procedural so as if as this tomb if you change the parameters and it gets bigger or changes shape or whatever those things will update so we're going to add another feature into this uh into this and this is where we can show how the tool can can offer you different options so we're going to put a plane in and we're going to cut the tomb make it cracked assume it's an old graveyard some of these pieces are old and so this grid we're going to take that and we're going to do something called matte size where we actually put it right in the middle of that object so they're they're connected in that way then we're going to put a mountain node on and that mountain node is going to just agitate that a little bit and then we're going to take um all the bunch of these nodes just lower them down we're going to add a boolean down and that will allow us to shatter the piece of geometry so we bring the mountain into the second the paul extruded the first and um we're going to change this to uh shatter which uh just basically slice uses the the one surface to slice in and then we can feed that back in the network before we do we're going to get a group out of this and the group will be all the pieces above the line now we're going to put a switch node down so instead of just accepting this option we're actually going to have it as an as as one way of working so switch nodes are a way of creating [Music] different flows of data that you can work with inside houdini and then promoting those up so if you go to the switch node you see we can either have it cracked um or not cracked and actually we're going to just change that to 15. it does not need to be as quite as strong an angle there so you've got a couple options here you can either have it cracked or not have it cracked and those options can be made available to here and you can also control whether you make it available in the user interface so we're going to put in the select input and we're going to turn this into is it cracked and you can make that into a type uh we're gonna make that into a toggle i think that's way down at the bottom oh wait no before we do that no no that's what we want we want to go here and we want to make that uh a toggle and press accept and so once we've accepted that we can rebuild this and inside uh you'll see that it looks a little different you have it cracked or uncracked correct or uncorrect so that option is there it was turned out to be cracked by default and the reason for that is the defaults you can go to here and the default is one which is on we could make the default zero and accept that it won't change it i think here because you've already pressed the button but if you were to totally start from scratch then it would be uncracked by default um and then you'd have to turn it on if you wanted to have the crack so there you go that we've made that available as an option now back in houdini if we want to we can add more parameters from this to enhance it further let's add a separator in you can build the ui with little little elements like separators and folders and what we're going to do here is we're going to bring in uh the rotation of the crack so just in case you want to control how what the crack angle is and the other thing is the using the mountain stop we can change the sort of the noise or the agitation by bringing in the height the height from here and that will be another parameter so like i said as along the way anything you think that you might want to give control to the artist when they're working with the asset you can promote that and have that work now we'll tinker with those features that we've added later um in the meantime what we want to do is we want to have a bunch of different options for how this particular tombstone looks we want to have it cracked we've already figured that out but if it's cracked maybe we want to remove some pieces or move uh the top piece away or maybe keep it so we're going to create a menu option of different possibilities and to do that we need to create another um another switch node and that switch node needs to to find the right pieces so we're going to start with a split node that takes the top of the tomb away and the split node puts the the bottom of the tomb on one side and the top of the tomb on the other so if we as you can see with the match sizes the top of the tomb is going off on the right uh and the bottoms on the left so we're going to go and we're going to rotate that let's say 90 degrees actually out there 90 degrees in zed and we're going to position that over here rotate it a little bit and push it back actually it looks like it's upside down maybe we need to go negative 90. um and then we'll just rotate it like this and have it back there so it as if it fell off now we're going to go in and put another mat size down and in this case um we don't want to center it instead what we want to do is leave x in zed and we just want this to be minimum so it places it on the ground now it just occurred to me that this is all happening above before we move the base before that transformer we probably don't want that so we can wiggle this out of the network this is some of the flexibility of working with houdini and say we don't want to do that there we want to do that down here so we're going to split it there we're going to have the same piece go off which it's working it's hitting the ground properly and then we're going to merge that back in so there's a couple different ways that we're going to want to merge it in um one is we're going to merge it um after after the crack uh well there's a switch node which is where we're going to have our choices so we're going to start with one merge where we're going to merge the the original bottom shape and the and the the moved top shape and that gives us our option there now the other thing we can do is um so that's the the second option so one is cracked and one is is there we'd like a third option which is to have it cracked but but not having fallen at all so we see the crack but we it hasn't either broken off or disappeared so in that case there's there's the one where they're all working together now we can change the order here so there's our three options so it's either cracked but available cracked and gone or cracked on the ground and we want to make those available uh up to the top level so just like any other parameter we need to to promote this but we're going to turn this specifically into a menu and the way we do that is we edit our properties and we bring another separator over and we're going to take this switch node and we're going to put it there and we're going to call this just variants so we can create different variants of the of the thing we're going to use a menu and 0 is going to we can give names to this so zero is just so straight everything uh it's cracked but it's straight it's aligned um number one is broken and gone and number two is broken with piece with the piece on the ground and there we go now we can also take other things here now to fully make this procedural one of the things i'd like to do is we didn't create a relationship between the two boxes originally and i want to make sure we correct that so if we were to make this box bigger the base box would not go with it so what we're doing is we're going to paste a relative reference so the size in x of the tomb above plus 0.15 will give us the box below so their size and relationship to each other now doesn't change anything right now but if we were to change the width or the depth of the tombstone we want this base to have the same so we're going to pace relative reference and plus 0.1 so sometimes you've got to build those relationships into an asset to make it fully procedural and that's something we forgot to do earlier on so we build that and there we go so now we're going to save the tombstone and you'll see that we've got our menu here with our variants the cracked uncracked option and this gives us a lot of control over what this asset does we can go in rebuild that and there's that menu there's the cracking uncracked and there's the different there's the broken with the piece there's just the broken with no piece and there's the straight one so it's it's got the crack but it's it's it's still aligned it hasn't fallen off yet so there we have um this asset and uh let's just talk a little bit about what we did there so we just built an asset so we worked on it on our computer where we had both unreal and houdini we were able to save that to disk and then re-ingest that in and test it out so we create and test an asset now once we have an asset and we feel that it's ready for our game we can distribute that to other people using unreal engine and they're using the unreal engine plug-in and they do not have the ability to run the interactive version of houdini they can only run the houdini engine under the hood and they can consume these assets that we've created and this is a big part of the houdini pipeline so you've got the tool builders and then the people who consume those tools and use them in their work and if at any point they say well the tool isn't quite doing what i want they can go back to the tool builder who can update that asset and when a change is made to the digital asset those changes will be distributed to everyone who's working with them on the different levels and they'll have those new new features or benefits that have been added to that tool so the next thing we're going to do is build a little graveyard and we're going to do that using instancing so we're going to build an instance in asset similar to the placement tool that we did earlier but instead of along a curve we're going to do an area so we're going to draw a curve to represent an area and we're going to draw it make sure you draw it clockwise close that and press enter to finish now once we have that we're going to go back to the tombstone we're just going to borrow the first two nodes just as a temporary [Music] representation of what we want to copy now when these pasted over the um because they had channel references in them up to the digital asset they sort of broke a little bit so we just need to replace that with the original values and the same with the poly bevel that distance was promoted up to the top level we just need to change that channel reference to just a straight number so once we have that we're going to copy the points so we're going to copy the box to the points and we're going to use a particular feature called pack and instance this is the most efficient way and makes it available as instancing in unreal and we want more than just four of them so let's add in a scatter and a line node here and this will allow us to do a number of things get good coverage there and then we can do things like [Music] have different sizes so we can just have some variety in the shape and size of the tombstones so instead of us having to do that by modeling different tombstones the tool will help that with us we can then get some if it's an older one they're sort of tilted off a little bit and we can have some rotation negative 10 to 10 and that can be all built into the asset and can be controllable so once we've got this these features we're going to just make them into a digital asset just like we've done before and we're going to call this graveyard and we'll just put that into our project folder and accept now once we have this again we want to promote some parameters um just like we did before so we're going to get the scatter in a line is where a lot of the actions happening so we can go and promote the various parameters from here so we're going to bring the coverage over maybe add a separator then we can go focus on scale and then put the separator back and then maybe go down to the orientation and grab those things there so that gives us some good flexibility when working with this in the unreal engine now the other thing we want to do is we want that original curve to be something that we can manipulate so we're going to go in and promote that curve to an editable node and press accept and we'll see what that means in a second when we go to unreal in the meantime you can see here in houdini there's all the interface now we're back in unreal so we're going to take the original tombstone and just push that a little bit to the back and just let's get a better look at the overall area because this this graveyard assets can be a little bit bigger we're going to import this in we go and get it and import that in now we bring that over and there we go so we got this generic tomb stone being put around with some varieties different angles and so on and we can take the points of the curve so we promoted that curve up and that allows us to take these corners and move them we can also press the alt key to add points into the curve and further enhance it that way so that's that's a nice feature for creating some interactivity uh for your uh game artists or level designers uh the ability to work with these curves as an input device so now we're gonna go back to the original tomb and we're going to bake out a version of it so you'll see that there's a baked out version that's got the crack and then we can find it in there now if we go to the to the graveyard we can go down to there's an area well there's the parameters so we can play around with various parameters maybe we change that to 1.5 so we've got all that procedural ability but there's the instancer so we're going to go in and we're going to drag that tomb there and now we've got the tomb that we've designed earlier now being used in the graveyard now what's fun is we can also make more of them so if we want to change play around with the bevel to get a different look then we can bake that if we want to create a version that is cracked or broken we can bake that and if we wanted to create a version that's baked with the piece so all those different versions we're going to make those as some baked baked versions and there you can see in the bottom corner that we're piling up some options there so once we have those we can go back to the graveyard and we can add um different instancing actors so we can say you know what i want a few of them to be like that and it randomly sort of places the the two different kinds that we have there uh we can add another one uh and and add some in that that are that have missing pieces and we can do it again and add there so we can add if this is a larger graveyard we can have a nice a bit of variety in the different kinds of assets that are being instanced um and let's you know take it further let's uh create a one that's just normal straight with a a corner there we go and that that'll add some nice variety too so we could we set the bevel at zero um and that's creates more of a straight one so we add another one and there we go so this tool that we built has doing some nice instancing of these assets within the environment and we can actually play that and just walk around and get a feel for it and you know we can collide with them and run around them and there they go so we've been able to to populate this scene design this level using a whole series of procedural assets some of them from the starter kit and some of them that we built ourselves and one of the fun things with the instancing is you can actually take other things like for instance this steam here and if we add in here we can add that in and now some of the graves are replaced by a little bit of steam to give some mood to it now we're going to reduce some of the other ones out just because then we get more steam there we go and now we press pause and we can press play and there we go and now we've got the everything all set up a little bit moodier look for our graveyard okay so now you've learned how to use assets uh how to make your own asset but let's talk a little bit about how to get it prepared on your computer how would you install and license this thing for use um in your work so the first thing you do is log into the side effects website you would download the houdini software now you are downloading all of houdini but you might not be using houdini it depends on what your license is but houdini will always be there under the hood when you're using houdini engine when you install houdini you've got to make sure you click the houdini engine for unreal option to get that plug-in now when it gets installed it gets installed with houdini you've got to go find that plugin and there's a directory there that you have to it's a houdini engine directory that has to be moved into this path for for unreal so it's the engine plug-ins runtime directory you find that put the unreal engine in there and then when you load unreal the the houdini engine will be there now having the plug-in isn't enough you need a license for it so you can go to the houdini get by and click on the last tab the houdini engine for unreal and unity and in this case here you just get a free a free license and this will allow you to run the asset run the starter kit tools and so on no problem now let's go over what your different options are from a licensing point of view so if you're a commercial artist you would be using houdini core effects to create your digital assets those assets can then be run using the free houdini engine for unreal assets if you just want to consume the assets or the interactive licenses you can use current effects so if you're testing the assets or working with them and the file format the only file format that's consumed in a commercial setting is dot hda now we also have an indie version and it creates a different kind of format called hdalc or limited commercial and that works with houdini indi there's a free houdini engine indie you can get and it works in the two of those now when you're working with indy you can open hdalc's or hda's run that were created in a commercial but you can't go the other way and that's just a protection system within the within our ecosystem and similarly we have the education or non-commercial version of houdini which creates dot h-d-a-n-c now in the case of the houdini apprentice there is no matching version of engine that runs the plug-ins you cannot run the plug-ins with apprentice but if you are working with education licenses there is an education uh engine license that does work so there's a little more flexibility there so if you're a student using the free apprentice edition you can just bring your assets into into class and work with them there again just um diagram this out so we talked earlier about the person who creates and tests the asset so the license is needed there or are either houdini core or houdini effects but if you're consuming assets you can use the free houdini engine for unreal and so you know it doesn't matter how big your team is they can all have access to the ability to manipulate and work with those assets so that's a great feature right there and on the indie side [Music] again same thing the difference is that when you're consuming the assets you can only use up to three on a team for indie licenses so it's it's assumed to be a smaller ecosystem that you're working with for reference uh many of things we talked about today if you go to the the side effects website sidevex.com unreal there's a page that specifically outlines uh many of the things we've talked about here shows you where the starter kit is talks about other connections we have to the unreal engine things like the niagara plug-in for particles and the live link for doing character rigging type stuff and uh so yeah be sure to go there if you're if you want to get started well thank you very much i hope you um have enjoyed this presentation and got a good introduction into the world of houdini uh and um houdini digital assets the next presentation is going to take this a little further it's going to stay with the the cemetery theme but simon verstrade is going to talk about building game friendly assets and he's going to build a larger cemetery using landscape elements trees grass different kinds of grave elements tombs and how to get them all working together to create a bigger experience for developing a game again thank you very much and have a great day

Channel: Houdini

Views: 2,814

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: XoyYs16pt84

Length: 48min 36sec (2916 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 08 2021