AMANDA: Hey, folks! Have you been waiting to get
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village life in Medieval Dynasty, set in the harsh realities
of the Middle Ages. Storm our feed to learn
how Polish developer Render Cube combines simulation,
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and Alienware that are redefining the next-gen player experience. One teacher's love
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your real-time skills? Feast your googly eyes
on the new free courses available now on
Unreal Online Learning. Explore the basics of materials,
the steps for dataprep, and the use of Control Rig
with Sequencer and physics. Head over to Unreal Online
Learning to get started. Over 1,800 talented creators
participated in the Unreal Engine Short Film
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Games to learn more about the game's evolution
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Tuerer, BamaGame, GrumbleBunny, staticvoidlol, Nachomonkey2,
chrudimer, Kehel18, and A_J_E_42. Onto our community spotlights,
Dev Enabled is a general game
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today is called Life Hunter, a story on global
warming and humanity, where scattered life is
the only thing that matters. This is just a teaser
of a longer form story. Stay tuned to Amaru
Zeas' ArtStation page for future updates! Thanks for watching this week's
News and Community Spotlight. VICTOR: Hey everyone,
and welcome to Inside Unreal, a weekly show where we learn,
explore, and celebrate everything Unreal. I'm your host, Victor Brodin,
and my guest today is Simon Verstraete,
technical artist from SideFX. Welcome to the show. SIMON: Thanks. Victor. Thank you for having me,
great to be here. VICTOR: Yeah,
and I appreciate the late notice. Because as of
last week's stream, I didn't actually have
any guest this week because I had a cancellation. So big up to Ben Mears
on SideFX for pulling this off and for Simon for
coming on last minute to talk a little bit about the
procedural tools with Houdini. Y'all have been working
on some cool stuff recently and that's what we're
going to show today. SIMON: So we can quickly jump onto a small
presentation and I will also do some demos in Unreal,
of course. So yeah,
let's go through a few slides. I will just-- VICTOR: One moment. OK, you're good. Go ahead. SIMON: Go ahead now? OK. VICTOR: Yes. SIMON: So first of all, I want to go through some slides,
talking in general about Houdini,
Houdini Engine, so everyone gets an idea
about what I'm going to talk about and what Houdini is doing here. So let's go. So I want to talk about
Houdini Engine and version 2 about this,
so giving an intro to that. And I'm also going
to use the starter kit, and this is going to be
a small live demo where I'm going to go into
Unreal and play around with some procedural tools. And I also want to
mention something about Project Titan,
which is a learning project from SideFX this year. So we'll give you a
bit of a sneak peek in what that project will be. So first of all,
let's talk about Houdini Engine. So what is this Houdini Engine? So we have all of
our Houdini software. So if you would not
be familiar with Houdini, it's a node-based software
where everything you do is a node. So if I have a box
and I would do bevel, those are separate nodes. So with Houdini,
we can create procedural tools, like a rock or tree, house. In retrospect,
it can all make cool tools inside of Houdini, do procedural
things and setups in Houdini, which are great. And then the next step would
be like how do I take these tools and bring them inside of Unreal? That is where something which
is called Houdini Engine comes in. So we can send the tools
to Unreal directly or even open them in Unreal. So our tools,
like a tree generator, is now being able to
open inside of Unreal. We also have this
plug-in for other software. So we have it for Unreal,
Unity, Max, Maya, and so on. So we have a
variety of usage here. So it's a really
powerful way of opening a procedural tool you built in
Houdini into another software. Especially, to mention is
that this is for an editor mainly. So you mainly use this to
build faster your environments and then you just
take out the results, so this is not something that
we want to use in the runtime. And then I'm going to
show you some small video demos about this. So here I have a
small demo here. So in the game Unreal,
we have sliders, so we can change
the slider and then we proceed to
generate new variation. So it's quite artist friendly,
because we are just working with basic menus
like a slider or toggles or menus. Like you can just slide
here and then generate different variations of that. So this is how it would look
like it in Unreal, for example. So it's quite simple too,
but we can normally generate multiple different
versions with this tool. So you can see,
I can quickly get versions from this sci-fi theme. And then here is quickly another
example, which is a ivy tool. So if I move the sphere here,
it will automatically recalculate where things are growing. So whenever I move it,
it will automatically try to find a new path
around this object. And this is also nondestructive,
so I can still move my original inputs,
like squares or boxes, and it will automatically
start updating. So as you can see here,
it's just updating that,
so quite nondestructive. And you can also just,
for example, grab another tool, like a tree. So grab the tree tool, load it in,
and a few seconds later I have my tree here. So it's all done procedurally. And already,
like building a few small tools can be very powerful. So in this case,
if you want to build like a forest with like some ivy
growing on top of a building, it would be really quickly
by using a few tools. Then, next up,
I want to talk about version 2. So now you have
some idea of what Houdini Engine is,
so we can open our Houdini tools in Unreal, for example. But we recently have
Houdini Engine Version 2. So we have a few new features. And I mainly want to talk about PDG,
world composition, session sync. There are, of course,
way more than that, but I want to just
like quickly give you a glimpse of what's new. So we have PDG which
then which is actually for larger calculations. So basically, the nodes here
in Houdini would look like this. And every green dot a task. So if I need a tree and I
need 50 different variations of a tree,
I can use the different tasks here to give me each different three. So that's basically what PDG is. So just like large
calculations of a tool. Like we can quickly
get different results from one tool. So we can use that
to make bigger worlds, and we also have a
special menu for Unreal. Here is small demo of that. So in the background now,
Houdini is calculating everything. Once it's done calculating,
it will bring everything to Unreal. So here it's seeing
one part of a terrain is its task,
so it will bring that into the scene when it's done calculating. And that's how we can,
for example, build something bigger, something that's
more of an open world. OK. So that's some quick example
of what you can do with PDG. You can do all kinds of things
with PDG, but in this case, it's like world building. Then next up is world
composition support. So world composition
is a feature from Unreal which allows you to
manage bigger worlds. If you have an open-world game,
this is quite interesting. So you basically get a
top down view of your map and you can easily
manage your world. And in Houdini,
we can say that hey, when we output
something that's terrain, work with world competition. So it's like automatically
set up for that. So we also have
done autostreaming, things like that. So we can really work
together with Houdini and Unreal to make that happen. So here's also then
a small demo of that. So I previously
generated the desert. Now I'm walking around in it. And you can see here
that the gray areas are being in loading, and core
areas are being correctly loaded. So as I walk around,
you will see that things start to load and unload. And this is all basically
done by default with world composition. So it's a great way of combining
the two powerful softwares together where Houdini
generates the world, generates some terrain placements,
and so on. And then Unreal, for example,
we use the Houdini world composition to
make this all happen. So it's just an example here,
and you can see it's clearly unloading
parts that are pretty far away from the player. You can also, of course,
change these values as you go. But this is something that
you almost get out of the box. And then let's talk a
bit about session sync. This is a connection
between the two softwares, so Houdini and Unreal,
but also Unreal and Houdini. So if I have something
open in Unreal, I can also see them in Houdini. So I'll also show the
small video of that. So here in Unreal,
I have the sliders again, so they can play
around with the sliders. And it will update
in both software, so that's a great feature
and also great for debugging. So if I have an issue in Unreal,
I can always open session sync and see what's going
on in the background when I go into Houdini. So you can also just,
in Houdini, play around with sliders there. And you can see
that it's automatically will update in both softwares. So it's a great feature. And again,
if you're building a tool and you need to debug something,
you can just connect the softwares
and it is working together. So it's quite useful. Here is also another
thing that I did with it, is a small house generator. So in Houdini,
I have a simple layout generator. So whenever I click that button,
random layout, it will give me
some random cubes. And this automatically gets
used by a building generator and then turned into
a house by Unreal. So we are basically
sending point clouds and from these point clouds,
we then use instances. So these were some features
that I wanted to talk about from the newer updated plug-in. So V2 has also been
rewritten from scratch, so it works way faster
than the one before. But there is, of course,
more stuff that you can check out about this new plug-in. So we have a couple talks. So I did a talk,
Houdini with Unreal. But also Damien
did a talk and Damien is one of the developers
on this plug-in, so definitely check
out the talk by Damien. And he also shares a
few things for the future about where this plug-in goes. So I sent a link to Victor,
so you probably should find one of these
links in a similar description, I think. VICTOR: They're in
the forum announcement post underneath resources,
that's where you can find him. SIMON: Thank you. So yeah, if you're interested,
you can check them out. Quite interesting if you want
to know more about plug-in and things it can do. And then we are almost
going through the last demo, so I want to show
you some starter kit assets that we have at SideFX. So first of all,
the starter kit is a free tools, so you can use
that for learning. If you just want to try
out Houdini Engine, you can just
download them for free, open them in your project,
and play around with it. So of course,
you will Houdini Engine, so that's important to know. It's beginner friendly
and you don't necessarily need Houdini experience. So you can just open
these tools in Unreal and you can play
around with the sliders that you saw
before in the video. So you can just play
around with sliders, like you don't need Houdini experience. Of course, if you want
to like modify these tools, you then, of course, will need
some more Houdini experience, because you can open these
tools and edit them if you want to. So now let's jump into
Unreal and I'm going to give you some demos there. So I don't know if there would
be any questions already, Victor. VICTOR: Received a couple. I don't think we've had enough. Yeah,
let's maybe go through them. I think most of them
are fairly general, so we can go ahead and
cover them during the Q&A at the end of the stream. SIMON: OK, sure. Yeah,
so now let's go into Unreal here. So I already have
a message here. But of course,
first to mention is Houdini Engine
needs to be installed, so I have it here at the top. And I'm also
connected to a session, so it's also important
to have your connecting So now I have this tree,
but I can also grab it here. So we have a tree, I can
drag it and drop it in the scene. It will sort of like calculate
on the warm up tool a bit, so this might take a sec. And once it's done,
it's then ready to use. It will work way faster for us. So here we have that tree. So this is a tree. So it's the same asset
that you see here but just with some different settings. So what I can
do with this tree is I can, for example,
move around these points. So by default, I see this line
and I can click this point over here and start moving that. So if I move this over here,
you will see it automatically updates. So you can move that around. So I can go, for example,
grab this one, go a bit more extreme. And now my tree leans
more in that direction. So from here,
we can then change some properties, like we can build custom
menus here to what you want. So a tech artist would like,
build this tool and then you can have some
level designers or other artists using this interface to then
modify the procedural tool. So let's say I want to
lift up the branch here, so let's lift it up. And you can see that
they're sort of like going closer to each other. So if I increase it more,
you can have that information. There are some
more settings here to like, play around with
this branches and swarm. But let's talk a bit
about the leaves since it's quite different. So I use a low poly style
where on the other one, I used more like
playing cards for leaves. So I built a small
checkbox here. So if I would now don't
use the chunky leaves and use the normal leaves,
these are the cards. You know have the card here. So in those leaves,
we can then also assign a material. So we pre-built some stuff here. So if I would drag
and drop it in here, you should have that material,
so now we have that as well. So I can play around with settings,
so I can make this a bit bigger. That's nice to
make a bit bigger. We can play around with ceiling,
so just generating the variation. They are like scattered,
a bit different around the tree. And also the color
of this gradient is also coming
from vertex color. So in here,
I have this green vertex color. And then I actually
used a hue shifting to make it like the red color. So that's how this
is sort of working. So again, we can always go
back and forth between settings. Like if you're not happy
with like this left lean value, like maybe it needs to be more,
you can go back and forwards. I also have something here to
push down near the part here, so it's like pushing
down a bit more. So it can always go back
and forth between these two, because it's the procedural too. So even if I'm not
happy with this line, I can grab one of those dots
and change things here and there. So let's say you
have those assets and now I want to
use this in the game. So currently,
it's still like a Houdini asset, but we have some option
here for baking assets. So once you finish,
you can just click bake. You can back to an Actor,
Blueprints, some more things. But in this case,
let's just click bake to Actor. So it's [INAUDIBLE] Actor. And normally if I would go here,
it created the new folder called
Houdini Engine baked folder. And I have some trees here. So here, this is the three
that I'm currently having. So it's the same
result as you seen. I also made some
other one before. So you can just now
quickly just spent half an hour making like 10 to 20
different trees for your game and you're done for that. So by just having a simple tool,
you can already start
generating different versions. And that's basically
how you would build it. So here,
this is still in normal mesh. And then here's
my Houdini Engine. So you still have some more
settings here for outputting and you can automatically
delete this Houdini assets when you have done baking,
for example, and so on. So that's the tree example. If you're interested
in Houdini itself, we also offer some tree tools. So we don't have to build
tree generators from scratch, we have some tree tools there. So are there any questions,
for example, on this tree or are we good to go? VICTOR: We had one question, which is where do you
get the tree generator? SIMON: So it is
part of the starter kit. I also normally send you that
link so it should be available there as well. Or you can just Google
Houdini starter kits, you should be able
to quickly see that. VICTOR: Pasting
in the chat right now. SIMON: So again,
this is all free. Like what I'm going to
show you next will also be available for free. So if you have access to
the new Houdini Engine, you can just try it out. Or if your studio's
interested in Houdini, you can just try
these out for free. And then here,
we have the worlds tool that I made. And this world too
is built out of boxes. So I often find boxes or
simple shapes quite useful to guide a tool. So if I now click this box,
well, we already did some setup here. So if I were to rotate this,
the tool will start and it will update. So you can see we
now have this world. So it can make something
more complex, like maybe this. I can see that that
perfectly works. So now I can press play,
and I can walk around. So go walk around in the street. And now I can just like say,
OK, maybe this world needs to be
bigger or I need more space here and there. You can just jump
back to our tool and we can move things around,
so maybe I want to move this back here. And each made some changes. So let's look a bit
at the parameters. So the way I use the boxes
is by something which is called a World Outliner inputs. So we can basically
select here things. So these cubes are all selected,
so if I were to deselect this
cube and use a selection, it will now remove this cube
so that cube is not in that system anymore. So if now go back to selection,
select this back, and this is now
back in the system. So the idea is here that you
can just grab the cubes here from unreal. Add more of them and
make a more complex world. VICTOR: Hey, Simon. Sorry for interrupting. We're seeing a little
bit of artifacting coming from your screenshare here. Let's go ahead and just go
be right back for a moment and we're going to go ahead and
adjust some of Simon's settings to try to compensate for
the upload rate of his internet. We will be right back, everyone. All right, we are back. Thanks for waiting, everyone. Just adjusting some
settings on Simon's end to make sure that we don't
have all those nasty artifacts when he's moving around
in the interface. Cool. I think we are good to continue,
Simon. Please go ahead. SIMON: OK. Thank you. So yeah,
so we had our world tool. And based on these boxes,
we can generate some shapes. Like it automatically figures
out in sections and so on. Now,
let's quickly show some settings. So we can adjust the
size from this square, so now it's just like 50 by 50. We can make it bigger. We have some
settings for the border, like this border you see here. And we can add more
geometry to this or less. So if I say,
the corners here are five, you would see that they
are like more low poly. If I would increase this back to 10,
they are more smoother. Furthermore, some settings
for the roadlines or also, like, output settings,
we can automatically also generate
collision from Houdini and bring them in Unreal,
that's also possible. You have some UV
properties and also materials. So we can have multiple
IDs or we can have single ID with vertex planes. So as you could see,
like we can really build our own menu to whatever your need is. So in this case,
you can build multiple material IDs, some UV settings, and so on. So you can do a lot of different
things and build your own menu. So again,
you can always go into Houdini and add or remove
more options for this too. So if you already would
be more experienced, you could just take this tool,
you can download it
from the website. And you can maybe start
building a house generator on top of this. Like you can calculate that
there is enough space here and maybe let's divide that
space into a couple squares and then extrude
them to a house. So that was the bit
about the world too. And now I want to show
you another interesting tool, which is the edge damager. So this is all in game engine,
so we can do edge damaging here. So it could have that tool,
so HGAs. Edge damaging,
so drag and drop that. This mechanic fakes
some time to calculate. And here we have a basic setup,
so you can see that this chipping
off the edge of an object. Then you can use
something like this. So these simple shapes,
and again, these are shapes from Unreal. Like if I need an extra box here,
just add the box here. Like maybe I want
something at the top. So and now I can use
my input menu again. So we need something
from our world or see, then start selecting,
select these. And use as input. And now we chips
automatically to that location, but I built an option
here to align outputs. So it's snapping back
to my original pivot here. And so now we have that
result now with edge damaging. So I hope you can
see it on the stream. This edge damage. VICTOR: Yeah, so occasionally we're receiving
your packets a little after you're showing things. So why don't you try to
just be a little slower and I think we could follow along. We're still seeing
some artifacts. Unfortunately, we cannot
fix Simon's internet right now. We're doing as good as we
can in the pandemic, I guess. Next time, Simon,
I promise I'll fly out to the office. SIMON: Yeah, sounds great. So I will go a bit slower then,
so it's good to know. So yeah,
so we have this tool that takes some basic
input like these boxes and automatically applies
some edge damaging. And this is actually done by a
Boolean, so under the hoods I use a Boolean operation. And it will cut off the
edges here along an object. So if I would go
here somewhere else, you can see that all
these edges are cut off. So we have some
settings for that as well. So we have, of course,
a basic seat parameter, which is the variation. So if I change that,
we have some variation. So it's probably like
quite slow on the stream, the damage overall
is quite subtle. You also have resolution. So if you look close enough,
you have like quite low poly gut here. So we can increase
or lower that. So you can increase
these polygons so that you have like
less or bigger chains. And of course,
we have an intens slider, so I can make this quite intense
or we can keep it super slow, like only like edges and
maybe a few cuts here and there. Then we also have
a noise intensity, so if I would crank this up,
you would see now some more noise in this variation. So we could see it's a
bit more chipped now. So the chips are
a bit more extreme with the noise increased. So if I increase the
scale of the noise, we will have some more
bigger scale with that noise. So we also have,
for example, chips here along a ground surface. So again, so a few settings
here and there to play around with. Damage settings for quickly
damaging objects and something that I've not shown is that we
can always go back and forward. So my original input
is still seen as active. So if I go back to my original
input and let's use this scale, you can then always go back
and forwards between that. So they can quickly scale this up,
scale this down. Make this one bigger,
maybe it needs to be a bit smaller. Like we can always go back
and forwards between our inputs and/or if we need to. So now what is
interesting here as well is that we can also subtract. So I can enable subtraction
and you can subtract this shape, and I want to use that sphere,
so select sphere. And now that sphere is seen
as a subtraction for my Boolean operation. So I will grab my sphere
and collide with my blockade, you can now see that we are
chipping off this whole chunk. So let me move my sphere around. So you can see,
they're just in real time, like this Boolean on geometry here,
whatever they need to. So we can move that around,
play around with that. It's also playing some edge
damage here, as you can see. VICTOR: Looks great. 3dgo was wondering,
adding edge damage-- sorry, here. I know how to talk. Adding edge damage
would add poly count. Is there a way to
automatically bake out the normal map of the damage
and apply it to the original mesh? SIMON: In my set of what I have here, no, but what you're
asking is definitely possible. And Houdini has a maps baker,
so you can pick out normal map, height map,
diffuse vortex scroll, you can do roughness,
and also all kinds of things. So you would have to
get built on top of this to open this tool,
add a baker in there. And then sort of like
unwrap the input here. Like you can do some
[INAUDIBLE] on the original model. And then bake in there,
so that's definitely possible, but in here, I'm not doing
that to make things easier. VICTOR: And that's
something that would be, maybe not easy,
but you would at least have the option to do that,
sort of just adjusting one of these starter
tools that you've already provided in the starter kit. Building upon one of them,
right? And sort of add more
features from Houdini into the Houdini Engine. SIMON: Yeah, definitely. Like again,
these tools are editable. Like they are not
clocked behind something. We can open them in Houdini,
can just say and look asset and you can go into
this asset and start adding what you're feeling,
and adding a baker for normal map and you're basically done. If know how Houdini then I
think you can pretty quickly assemble that in here. Then I want to show
another example, and this is actually
with a megascan, so you can also use
a megascan asset. So instead of my inputs
being the blockade, let's grab the Megascans here. So start selecting
Megascans and now this barrier is being edge damaged. So let me bring it here. So of course,
I'm overriding the material here. Like you can see I have
like this vertex color, but I can edge damage this now. So maybe let's increase
some values here. Like you could see I'm
clearly damaging a few areas here and there. Like this is more extreme. So I'm really
damaging these areas and for UV,
I actually have an option here to keep UVs. So we can
keep the UVs that you inputted. But of course then
for the damaged areas, I did some auto UV in there. But of course,
that gets auto UV, so if you want it to be
something very specific, you can, of course,
do that in entity. Like if you have a specific
texture where this damaged part needs to be, you can build it. But in here,
it just has an option for keep UV. We can also do
auto UV and so on. So if you also don't use any UV,
of course, this will calculate faster. If you do auto UV,
then you also add auto UV on top of the
Boolean damage here. But it's definitely
possible to use something like a Megascans asset and
do some Boolean damage here, like you could see. And again,
my sphere is still linked here. So we kept my sphere. And let's get out
the part of the barrier. So you could see I'm
just gutting and damaging this barrier. So you can play
around with that. This is a small demo
of that Boolean tool. So it can be quite useful. You can open this in Houdini
and tweak settings in here. If something is not necessarily
what you want it to be, you can always go into Houdini. Or you can open the sessions sync,
where you can have two softwares
having the same results, so you can change along you go. VICTOR: Halefall was wondering if the column was
made out of basic shapes and then re-meshed
into a single object. SIMON: So what
I basically do here is there's not necessarily
re-meshing, but just like a Boolean. So I Boolean this
shape together. So we don't have
like the insides here. I can probably quickly show
that by enabling wireframe. So again, you can choose to
do like your re-meshing or voxel or other things. So in this case,
if I would go inside. You can see that
it's like Boolean has one single measure, even here. It's like now one measure. I can quickly maybe go
wireframe so you can see that it is-- I think I also some
extra divisions here. I'm not sure. Yeah,
you can see like it automatically deletes some inside
because it's a Boolean. So it will delete these
overlapped parts. I think I did some
divisions here to support the geometry better. But I also built in
the poly deducer. So yeah,
I built numerous of options here. But again, you can tweak
this as much as you want. This is just like a
demo tool for you to try. So you now have this
really damaged pillar. So yeah, so any more questions
on this while I have it open? VICTOR: I have some more. There's definitely
more questions. Let's see. Which one, which one, which one? Does the Boolean tool
work with dynamics? SIMON: Dynamics, you mean...? VICTOR: Not entirely sure. That was the question. I was hoping you would know
what they were referring to. SIMON: Well,
it's mainly just pure for geometry. Like if you just like,
very static geometry. Like it is designed to input
very basic static geometry, like you have these
boxes and this barrier. So again, this is something
that you use in Editor. So if you play your game,
you would bake out this asset to bake
out everything to a single static asset. So there is no
dynamic thing here. VICTOR: That makes sense. Christos-Marios
Eftichidis was wondering, what about
collisions in this case, and I would assume
it's the same thing, right? You actually generate
a mesh out of that and you then have to
generate collisions for that mesh. SIMON: Yeah, yeah. So in this case, I don't think
I built an option for collision. So in the world tool,
I had like an option for collision, and here I didn't. What you could do is you
could use this base input and sign it as
collusion in Houdini. Because Houdini will
receive the same mesh here. And then you can just say,
hey, you can give it the text,
like you need you can assign text
to geometry and then it will see this
action in question. So that could be
maybe interesting to do. VICTOR: There other ones are fairly general so
you can continue, and then I'll make sure to
go through them in the end. SIMON: Yeah. Yeah,
so I have one more demo here that I want to show you live. And that is a small
level generator. So it's very useful for
like a top down game. So here this tool generates
a level based on boxes here, in this case. But it also uses something
which is wave function collapse. But first, let's just show the boxes,
so if I move the box it will then update here. So my tool is now warmed up. So you could see if I move
these boxes, it will update. So that's something or a way
to block out quickly like a level by just placing boxes
and then everything too calculates an area. So what is special here is
that you might notice that they have some specific colors. So a corner has this gray,
these three pieces are like more pinkish,
then the ground is more purple. Like they have
all a specific color, and that is because they
are using a modular set. So the artist,
or an artist, or yourself, has to build like
this modular kit. So here I took some
pieces of a module kit. And normally,
what you would do is you would manually put this together,
so like copy paste it and take some time to
put everything nicely together. But with this Houdini tool,
it basically figures out where things are. So it will take that
model and it will based on the nice position
where it needs to belong. So that's the idea of this tool. If you're interested in
these floor tiles= sets, it's using a Wang tile set. So if you Google that, you
will find more about what this is. So it's called a Wang tile set. So it's quite
interesting if you are into these procedural things. Now let's jump into
wave function collapse. So let me correct,
quickly, an image here. So here I have an image. So it's like 20 by 20 pixels,
it's super low res. And what it will do is,
wave function collapse sort of like
analyze the image and they will scale
it up or try to repeat that on a bigger scale. So it's great, for example,
to quickly generate levels. So I can roughly sketch out what
I want this layout and the wave function collapse
will try to replicate that on a bigger scale. So he had already
filled in the texture and I'm going to enable
wave function collapse. And as you can see, it is now
generating these extra rooms. So on top of my cubes,
it is also now generating a random layout. So based on the wave function. So here, let's say I want
to have a bigger level. Let's say I need
it to be like 50. So let's wait a moment. So the bigger the level is,
the more time it will take for the wave
function collapse to calculate. So you can see,
it's now like a bigger level. But of course,
I'm going to maybe keep smaller here, so it's a bit faster. So we can also get to play
around with seeding value. So we have here variation. And if I would now quickly grab
my player, my [INAUDIBLE] guy, and release it here. I can now play this level. So I can walk
around in this level. So again, you would have to use
your own module assets and kit to make this more final. But overall idea is that we
have a tool that automatically places modular tiles
next to each other so you don't have
to worry about that. I've also made a tutorial
series on this, which is called a dungeon generator. So it might also be
interesting if you're looking into sort of like,
level generators. So I have some
more settings here. You can also delete that gray
border if you don't need that, so we just have this level. So again, like we have this
randomly generated layout, wave function collapse. And we can combine it
with custom meshes here. So if I need to have this
specific boss room over here, like I need a boss room over
there so I need more space. I can drag the cubes around,
so we'll have that space there. So it's the generator with
wave function collapse. We can also scatter
here of these cubes, like you can replace
that by assets. So what could be interesting is,
let's say I want to grab
my tree here and I want to use my tree in
one of these instances. So here we have instances,
so we can show this to Unreal. But we also have different
outputs as instances. So now let's place
the cube with my tree. And as you can see,
now I have these trees automatically assigned here. So again,
these are just instancing. So if I would play this now,
you can see that we have
automatically now scattered around these trees. VICTOR: Is it possible to run that generation at runtime
or is it editor time only? SIMON: Yeah,
so it's editor only. So the Houdini Engine overall
is mainly for editor purposes. So it's for building
things faster and then when
you want to play it, you just sort of have
a baked version of that. So that's the overall purpose
of the Houdini Engine here. So yeah,
so that was the re-generator. So again, they can also for example,
bake out this photo and plug it into another system. Or maybe I could
use the damage tool to build my modular
kit and so on. I can use a different kind
of small procedural tools to plug in picket and
procedural tools and so on. That was it for the demo. So again,
we have more HGAs or Houdini tools, you can have a DS tool. I'm not going to go
over every single one. That would be a bit longer. But yeah,
feel free to check them out. VICTOR: Yeah,
there's both a starter tutorial on sidefx.com as
well as the download for the Unreal starter
kit from SideFX. You can find all the links in
the forum announcement post on the Unreal Engine forums. Ready for a couple of questions? SIMON: Yeah,
also have a small last part for the representation. VICTOR: Oh, please go ahead. Be my guest, Simon. SIMON: And so last thing I just quickly want to
go over is Project Titan. So that's something we
also have been working on. Let's go to Project Titan. So Project Titan is
something SideFX will be working on this year,
so it's mainly a learning project. So if you want to show a
process of building a full scene, so we will have some
story and around that we will build a certain scene. So we will build a
cinematic and a real time site. So for a cinematic,
we will have [INAUDIBLE], who will be leading that. And I will be more
for the real-time site, so I will be using Unreal
to make a real time scene for Project Titan. And of course, everything will
be seen as a learning project, so we will share what we build. We will make tutorials
around things that we build. So if you have any
questions like hey, how did you guys do that,
we would just then make the tutorials and
show you how we did certain things. So that is basically
what Project Titan is or what we want to do with it. So I would want to give
you a few sneak peeks, but I also want you to
remember that this is still early on, like we are early
on in the process of this, because this will
be along the year. So you might see a few more
things here and there as we go. So what I've been doing is,
for example blocking out a scene, so this was an alleyway. So we had an ID as an alleyway. And I blocked out the scene
and in also real time in Unreal, so this is all in Unreal. What happens here? So the character walks up here,
then he walks over there, and so on. So what was great with
this is I basically give this to the cinematic guys,
guys who are working on the cinematic,
will be more like rendered in Houdini. And they use then USD,
so they grab the scene, convert it the USD file
and then open it in Houdini. So that's sort of like a quite
interesting way of working where we just quickly get in Unreal,
can block out things, I can quickly get an idea
in my head into a scene. And make it already look good. And in here,
we then have it open in Houdini. Again, these are like early shots,
early renders. But that's the overall
workflow that I had here that I think is
quite interesting. So of course, not everything
works perfectly with USD. Like if you have a very
complex material with like vertex planes or high clips
like the ground tier you see in this picture. Or like, some vertex
painting in the high clips, that will not perfectly
translate that with USD, of course. And then another thing is then
I built a small preview of a city that we want to build. So again, we want to, of course,
have some procedural nature to this. So at the moment,
it's not fully procedural because we are
still working on this, but this is sort of
like already trying to get the first few of
what we want to have. I also want to mention that
we are using some assets here like we are using Megascans,
get bash 2D, so we don't have to
build every single asset. We can then focus on
generating these things and using all kinds
of different packages, like omega scans to
build or build a bit faster. Also here's a quick sneak peek
of the generator to the house generator. So Paul from SideFX has
been making some updates to the house generator. And I can now
basically use a pattern like you could see here. I could type certain
numbers and each number stands for a certain module. So if I want to have
a store next to a hotel next to a museum,
I can just type the numbers of that and it will then try
to fit these models next to each other. So that's sort of
like a quick demo here of the house generator. So again,
we are still working on this, so this is something
that we are exploring. So the next steps would also
be bringing this into Unreal so we can just, in Unreal,
block out a scene, have this tool, type in some
patterns for the store. So if I want to have a
specific area with stores, I can just type the pattern. Like hey, I want five stores
here next to each other, that would be possible. So that's just a
quick look at Titan. So again, Titan,
we are working on it and we'll be making tutorials
about how this is done. So if you're interested,
feel free to check it out. So currently there's
not much about it, but you will probably hear
more about this along we go. And now, Victor,
I will answer everyone's questions. VICTOR: It's time. I'm so excited. Thank you very much, Simon. All right,
let's dive right into it. We have some general
questions around Houdini as well as the Unreal plug-in. I think let's start
from the bottom here because some of
them are relevant to some of the later things
you were showing. Halefall was wondering
if the scatter tools, if it's possible for them to
scatter Blueprints as well as other assets? SIMON: Yeah,
you can almost scatter everything. You can scatter Blueprints,
lights, particles. Yeah,
you can scatter all different things. VICTOR: Pretty
much any uasset then. SIMON: Yeah, you can directly call the light by its name,
like you can have the point lights,
scattered around five point lights. You can even
assign colors to it. So if you want to
scatter ten lights and they need to have a
different color, each of them, you can assign random colors,
for example. VICTOR: JooleanBoolean
was wondering, can Blueprints access and
modify HDA parameters? SIMON: That's something, we have some Blueprint support,
but it's still like early. Like you can open a
digital asset we have here. So these orange
Houdini things here, we can open them in Blueprints. But it still has some
more limited functionality, like you can generate
things in Blueprints, but you cannot just link
Blueprints code to these things directly. So that's something that's,
I think, not available right now. VICTOR: And if you're
watching and you're wondering, wait, this is an editor tool,
what does Blueprints to do with that? And it's the fact
that you can actually run Blueprints in editor
and build blueprints for editor
functionality in Unreal. So I think that's why Julian
was asking about that. Another question
from JooleanBoolean, is Houdini able to access the
Unreal Engine Content browser? Like a collection of assets in
a folder that I want to scatter? That's the question,
can you point to a folder rather than a specific uasset? SIMON: Most of the time, when you want to
scatter something, you will often just directly
point to that to uasset. Like I want to
scatter that model. We don't have something,
I think, to say like, hey,
this is my folder model, scatter it around. I don't think we have it. VICTOR: So it's a
little bit more similar to the sort of
Foliage Tool workflow where you specifically had what
you want the tool to work with? SIMON: Exactly, it's like that. VICTOR: Let's see here. Your next question
comes from Lynorek, and this is more a
little bit of a clarification, but they were wondering aren't
those procedural tools creating thousands of unique assets
and tanking the performance with no autoinstancing at all? And I think this goes to
clarify that it's an editor tool in editor time, right? So it won't process at
runtime and essentially once you've placed all of
these assets in the scene, the default autoinstancing
in Unreal Engine will do its thing, right? SIMON: Yeah,
so it's really the idea is that you bake out everything. Like with the edge
damage tool here, this is something that you
would bake out as a model, like a static model. But if you can also instance
things around and then it will just use the instancing
system from Unreal and it's optimized
because it's just instancing. VICTOR: Reversednormal was asking are there plans
for Houdini Engine to be able to output volumes? This would be
useful for creating triggers and other level
mark-up inside a Houdini asset. That's possible though, right? SIMON: I mean, I think so, yeah? VICTOR: Yeah, because if you're able to scatter and
dynamically add Blueprints, you can have a Blueprint with
a volume and associated logic to it, right? SIMON: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. VICTOR: So for
your level generator, say there were some
traps or some doors or any other form of Blueprints
where the player entering a volume would trigger some
form of logic, you can go ahead and sort of
procedurally add those as another uasset in
the level generator, right? SIMON: Yeah, definitely. Like as soon as
you see something that is being instant,
you can drag a uasset in there. VICTOR: Go make some
really dangerous mazes for us to explore. KniceGuy was asking,
does learning Houdini require math above
algebra or is Houdini more based on arithmetic
and logical application? SIMON: Depends on how far,
or what you do, or how far you actually
sometimes want to go. Like if I look back at
how I learned Houdini, I barely studied math,
I just tried to use basic logic. Like I have this point,
so I want instance that thing. So it depends a bit
on what you want to do. Like even though with
this Boolean edge damage here, like it's a Boolean. It doesn't use any
special math or algebra, it's just doing Boolean
damaged pieces with a input. VICTOR: Would you say that it's from just the philosophy
of approaching the tool, it's similar to how we
have like a large math library inside Unreal Engine,
right? You don't need to know
what a dot product does or what it actually is, right? You just need to
know how to use it. Would you say that it's
similar sort of working with the tools in Houdini? SIMON: Yeah,
I mean a lot of things have already been done for you. It's just like you need to
know how to use the node, but you don't
necessarily need to know the whole math behind the node. Like there is
node for scattering, there is node for automatically
transferring this thing to another thing, or calculating
distance between objects. Like some things have
been built in for Houdini, so most of the time you
don't have to use the math. You just have to know
how to use the nodes. VICTOR: Even in a job
interview for the games industry,
very few people will ask you, do you actually know
what that function does? As long as how to use it. SIMON: True. VICTOR: Let's see here,
a question from Lazy Bum. Can seats be autorandomized
on asset instantiation in the editor? So for example,
if you placed many trees, they all have different
seeds automatically. SIMON: I would say
that that is possible, but that also would
increase the calculation. So if every single
instance needs a new seed, then it will,
of course, increase, like every single
instance is a new thing. So it will increase
calculation time. Unless you already
have a library baked out of trees,
for example, and then you just randomly pick
from the 20 different trees and then it will be a
bit more optimized. VICTOR: Yeah,
you almost get diminishing returns at some point. Say you have like 10,000 trees,
right? Does every single tree need
to be theoretically different? A lot of games
only have a couple of variations and
the way that you can composite them
in the scene helps remove any sort of perception
of them being the same. Let's see, some of the
questions about real time, we already covered that. You can always write
in Unreal Engine tool, you can generate all the
assets with Houdini, right? And then you can
write a tool for Unreal that can do all
the stuff at runtime. That's why they
go so well together. So going back to some
of the earlier questions from your initial
starter kit presentation. NoveDies was asking what are the
performance considerations when using Houdini in Unreal Engine? SIMON: Well,
it depends on what you do, because most of the time you
just bake it out to do a mesh. Or if you just use instancing,
like you're just instancing, like you can have a tool that
only uses your model that you already have and just places
them in the scene for you. So it depends. Once you hit play,
you need to bake everything down. So you don't really
have performance that drops from Houdini. It just like bakes it down when
you want to play your game. VICTOR: So it's
more of a question of the developer's computer
versus the end users' when it comes to using Houdini Engine. SIMON: Yeah, yeah. VICTOR: Upgrade that RAM. That's usually
where you fall short. SIMON: Yeah, true. VICTOR: So more
general questions in regards to the
usage of Houdini. MR3D-Dev was wondering,
I think this is a question for both of us,
can I use Megascans and Houdini to work in Unreal
Engine and still abide by Epic's
license of Quixel stuff. So I guess my question
for you would be then, are you aware if there
are any limitations on what other forms of assets you
are allowed to import and work with in Houdini. SIMON: I mean, I think if you want to use
Megascans in Houdini, then I think you might
need a license for it. VICTOR: So I think,
not a lawyer, but what I know about
the Megascans license and Megascans being
free in Unreal Engine is that if you ship an Unreal
Engine product with Megascans, you are free to use them. And so that's an
important difference, because even if you are
using Megascans in Houdini, you don't ship Houdini, right? You're not shipping
a Houdini application. And so the end product is,
in fact, an Unreal Engine application. And therefore,
you are good to use Megascans. I guess my question was,
for you and maybe Ben who is in chat, if in case there
are any limitations of using assets of any kind, right? Inside Houdini,
when you're working with it. My guess would be no. SIMON: No, I don't think there are any limitations. There is also
[INAUDIBLE] for Houdini. VICTOR: Ben Mears
is saying no limitations that he's aware of. So go him. Make all the things. See here, next question comes
from Alex Gachanja, who's asking,
does Houdini Engine import SOP nodes and associated textures? SIMON: So, yeah. Houdini uses SOP based. You can just use,
I think it was SOP or S-O-P. So all these tools you
see here in the scene were all SOP-based tools. I did not use any textures,
but I think it's possible that if
you have like a material properly set up,
it will also import that material. I think I had a material here
on my edge damage tool. If I enable here set
material for damage, it will actually
import a material. So normally, this should be red. So the red color comes from
a material inside of Houdini. So if you set the
proper material, it normally import
everything correctly. VICTOR: I had no idea
what an SOP tool was. Node. SIMON: It's the Houdini
magical language. VICTOR: I like that. SIMON: You have SOPs,
DOPs, VOPs, ROPs. VICTOR: I need to learn
the Houdini terminology so I can be as cool
as all the Houdini kids. SIMON: It's just
like a shortening of surface operation. VICTOR: Here's
another good question. I saw this asked a couple of times,
actually, but the question
came from Mostafa Nabil. Do we need to have
Houdini enabled and installed to work with the
UE4 Houdini plugin? SIMON: Yeah, I think so. I think you need to
install a version of Houdini and also have the plug-in. So what you often
have is that the plug-in is bind to the version
you have of Houdini. So if you have within your
version number 18.5, dot so on, the Houdini plug-in
is also focused to work with that
Houdini version. That's something important
to keep in mind sometimes. VICTOR: Yeah, and that goes to say that the Houdini
plug-in for Unreal, it's not entirely standalone
to the point where, since you require
Houdini to use it. Since we're basically taking
the Houdini Engine and we're sort of running that
inside Unreal in editor time. You're also required to have
a license to use Houdini, right? SIMON: Yeah. Yeah,
the Houdini Engine is with licensing. So I mean, as soon as you
have a license from Houdini, you probably have Houdini
Engine there for free. VICTOR: This was not a question about instanced static meshes
or hierarchical instanced static meshes. And I think the answer is the same,
that once you've generated the asset of the mesh
that you were sort of modifying in using Houdini engine,
you can then use that asset just like any other static
mesh in the editor, right? SIMON: Yeah,
I mean I baked down here, the tree. So if I go back here, like these
are normal static geometry. Like there's no special
Houdini settings here anymore. It's baked out to
normal mesh here. VICTOR: See if we got
some last minute questions here. Yes, we did. Alex Gachanja was asking,
does the house generator generate the textures? SIMON: That I showed
in the presentation probably, at the last? So what we will do is,
we will instance a model that's already set up in Unreal. So if you set up the
model correctly in Unreal, just use that as input
for a tool and then it will work fine. Basically the same how
I did to the trees here. So we just set it as
an insistence here. So in the building generator,
we will just plug in a building block. VICTOR: Question
comes from Coryy42. Can you write vex
expressions in UE4? SIMON: Well,
I mean if you expose a certain string value or value here to write that,
that might be possible. So I need to probably
have like specific parameters to write that. VICTOR: Another
question from Alex, can you generate
particle effects using the Houdini Engine? SIMON: We have
actually plug-in for Niagara. VICTOR: Oh. SIMON: So,
but it's actually just, you do some
calculations in Houdini and then you save that out in a file,
which is basically containing
the positions of its points. And then that file is
then read by Niagara, sort of like replicated effect. So it can be interesting
to look at this. We also have to tutorials
on that for Niagara plug-in. VICTOR: Create The Imaginable are asking are Houdini
universal scene description meshes supported by
Houdini Engine or Unreal? SIMON: So you mean USD, right? OK, so I mean USD can be
opened in Unreal or Houdini. So I mean you can
even make your Houdini tool that is exporting USD. Like it can here
have this built, like an export something for
you in my parameter if I want to. VICTOR: Is there something you can't do with Houdini? See, let's grab the last
couple of questions here. Youmna Sahab was
wondering so we can not import the asset
in Unreal Engine if we are on Houdini apprentice? SIMON: Yeah, so Apprentice has some limitation
since it is free. So again,
if someone didn't know, like Houdini has a free
version which is called Houdini Apprentice,
so you can use that. It's mainly actually for
learning Houdini and trying out Houdini. But Houdini Engine or
some functionalities of Houdini Apprentice are not available. Like you would probably,
like you can also use in the license to make
everything that you want. VICTOR: Let's see, oh. Another question
from Aliens from Space. Can we do Sims in
HDA in Unreal engine? SIMON: Yes and no, like it depends on what you want. Like we can force a tool to
calculate at a certain frame. Like if I do water simulation
and I convert it to geometry, we can say like at frame 100,
I want to see frame 100 in the viewport. That's possible, but we
cannot just like see the fluids instantly by the tool. So we have to either export
it to like vertex animation or Olympic files and then we
would actually see the result. But Houdini
Engine itself will only be able to probably
output one frame at a time. So we would have a slider,
that is sort of like seeing what
frame needs to be calculated to see your sim. VICTOR: Maxim Shevtsov was wondering, can I generate vector
fields with Houdini Engine? SIMON: Yeah, there are some tools inside of Houdini. I don't know if
you would have it. You need the Houdini
Engine for that. But instead of Houdini itself,
we have some vector field tools. Also like volume
slicing and so on, like if you want to use
that for clouds, you can do volume slicing there as well. VICTOR: Question from
earlier that I missed you. Eugene Flormata is asking,
can you create characters
with Houdini engine, pack meshes with weight,
and skeletons with KineFX? SIMON: KineFX. Not yet, actually. If you watch the
talk from Damien, so he is one of the developers. At the end of the talk,
he will actually show a glimpse of what's
next for this Houdini Engine because there will be still
improvements as long as we go. So that's something that
we are definitely looking at, to have the character
and then import that with the rig and so on. VICTOR: Next question
comes from Reversednormal. Does the Houdini Engine
license permit distribution in mod kits? That one is a little tricky,
because that would essentially require the user,
so say whatever it is or isn't. It would require the user
who's downloading the mod kit to own a Houdini license. They would actually need to
have Houdini installed on their PC. And so I'm not sure
that I would ever want to limit a mod kit,
to sort have another tool other than the mod kit being required,
that is unlike Windows or a text editor,
or something like that. But I guess that's a question
for Ben, in case you wanted to. Yeah, in case you wanted to
ship that with an Unreal Engine mod kit, if that would be-- yes, so Ben's saying you
can take out assets and provide those in a mod kit
unattached to Houdini engine. And I think that's the right
approach because otherwise, you are going to sort of
put a price tag on being able to use the mod kit,
which would limit the reach and the
accessibility of using your mod kit. SIMON: Yeah, definitely. Like if you share Houdini files,
then you need Houdini to open it. VICTOR: Right. MakeBelieveTV was wondering,
do you have-- I'm not entirely sure
when they asked this, so let's see if you know. Do you have mesh
crossing problems with this? SIMON: But,
edge damage tool or the world? VICTOR: Not sure,
how about you respond about all of them? SIMON: Yeah, I mean sometimes it can happen that there is
some conflicts in the mesh. Then I would recommend
opening session sync so we can see what's going
on in Unreal and Houdini and then we can debug. Because sometimes you
need to do some mesh cleaning or maybe even remesh the
models to get clean results. So I mean, that sometimes
can happen that you maybe need to figure out
a way to polish a bit, a input model,
since you don't already know what the input will be. But most of the time,
like with the world tool, it has some little bits
clean up with the input. So can easily figure out
intersections and nicely build these things. So, yeah. You can have issues
but then you probably need to build the
procedural system to clean up some of these issues. VICTOR: Cool,
and this is not really a question. It's actually an answer
that came from chat. DonPepe1705 filling in. For the question about
pointing to a folder for instancing
from an object pool, you can input the
folder path to Houdini and create a CSV from
the files in the folder. And then just use
those names for tagging the scattered points. Thank you, Don Pepe. Appreciate when chat fills in. Cool. Those were all the questions
that were on topic today, but I did want to message
something that came from Zayee. This is not a question,
but thanks a lot, Simon. You make me want to learn
more about Houdini every day. SIMON: Thank you. VICTOR: Oh and,
this is a question from Youmna Sahab. Is there a way we
can contact someone without bothering him too much? You can see his Twitter handle,
right? OK. I'm not going to point. You can see his Twitter handle,
it's right there. SIMON: You can also send me message on ArtStation,
that's also fine. VICTOR: So I'm
doing a last check. Cool. Simon, thank you so much
for coming on the stream and showing off
these tools today. I think we already
discussed with Ben Mears that there are some interesting
new developments with Houdini that's coming. And we will probably have,
I don't know if that will be you, Simon,
but someone from SideFX will be back to talk about Houdini
later this year. August is when we planned
to do a little bit of a Houdini update, more magical tricks. With that said,
I'm going to do my quick little outro spiel here and then
we will be offline. And hopefully I'm
going to let Skye know that we're
about to wrap this up and we can try to find
someone to raid today. But thanks to everyone
who's been watching today. Hope you enjoy the content,
hope it was valuable for you. If you have more
questions and would like to continue the conversation,
perhaps if you're watching this as a VOD
on YouTube or Twitch afterwards and you're not
with us here live, a great place to
continue the conversation is on the forum
announcement post that Skye will go ahead and
link in just a couple of seconds. In both chats,
they're pretty awesome at that. I'm not doing all
the linking anymore. I have help. I've had help for
quite some time now. It's very nice. Thank you, Skye. Head over to the forum
announcement post. That's the place
for post discussions. YouTube comments,
not the best when it comes to technical conversations. But the new forums
are good at that. If you're looking to find other
people in the community that might potentially live
close to your area, go out and visit
communities.unrealengine.com, it has a locator tool
where you can find meetup groups in your area. And now you might wonder,
but we're not really seeing each other right now,
they're a pandemic. And that is true,
but these groups are still active and they're hosting meetups
on their various discord channels. If you don't have
a group near you and you and a couple of
friends would like to start one, there's a little become a-- There's a form,
top right of the page. Brain freeze,
forgot what it says today. There's a form. You can go ahead
and contact us if you would like to become
a meetup group lead and then you get access
to our tool bevy which helps you organize
these meetups, give you a little
bit of publicity. Also make sure that you
visit our forums Discord. We have an unofficial Discord
channel called Unreal Slackers. It is fantastic. Some of them are here in chat. Everyone, give it up for P Fis,
I've seen him. He's around. One of the awesome
admins and moderators who make that community
as awesome as it is. You can also find us on Facebook,
Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, all the places. And we generally
post on most of them. So if you have one platform
that you are more interested in or more comfortable with,
you can just go ahead and follow us there. We do a community
spotlight every week and we also add those spotlights
to the Epic Games Launcher. And to make your
projects visible for us, you can go out and post them
in the forum release channel. There's a work in
progress channel. Tagging @unrealengine on
Twitter is another good way, we frequently
check all of those. And anything that comes our way,
it's always considered for
the community spotlight. You can also just
go ahead and email community@unrealengine.com
if you sort of have planned an announcement and
you would like to get in touch and let us know
that it's coming. We keep a close eye
on that email as well. The countdown videos that we
play at the stream every week, they are 30 minutes
of developments or usually 30 minutes
of development. I realized that the last
new one that we received from the main stark was
actually not what I say every week, and I thought it was great. So five minutes of footage
is what we're asking for. Send that to us to get it with
your logo and we will go ahead and composite that
into the countdown that we play every week. Have some new
ones coming up soon. If you stream on Twitch,
make sure you use the Unreal Engine tag,
as well as the game development ones, they are the two
that makes it easy for us to filter all the content
that's on Twitch so that we can find you when you're live. And that's precisely
the way that we search for people when we go
ahead to rate them afterwards. For those of you out
on YouTube right now, there's the rate feature. But if you want to continue
to watch more Unreal Engine content, you can hop over
to twitch.tv/unrealengine. And yes,
I said follow us on social media. That's where all
news Unreal comes. And SideFX Twitter handle,
I think it's just @SideFX, isn't it? SIMON: Yeah, I think so. VICTOR: Yeah, @SideFX, should be posted on the forum
announcement post as well,
where all things information lives in regards to the streams. Make sure that
notification bell on YouTube if you want to see
when we go live there. And next week, I have a stream,
but I can't announce it. Oh no, wait I can. Yes, because yesterday was
when the MetaHuman early access signup went live. So I can say that,
I just was not able to put it in the
newsletter for this month. We will go ahead and
have some of the developers from the MetaHuman creator
tool on the stream next week and we will go through
MetaHuman creator, watch a little bit and see what goes on behind
the scenes, what the plans are for the future, et cetera. Quite excited by that,
I think we have four developers from the team on
the stream next week. Cool, and that's my outro spiel. I've done my talking for today. Simon, thank you so much for
coming on stream once again. Chat,
please give it up for Simon and Ben Mears, who made sure that
this dream happened today. Go ahead and visit. I really should know the SideFX
website Simon, why don't you plug the SideFX website
where you can get Houdini? SIMON: I mean, just SideFX. VICTOR: That's it. SIMON: Just Google it. VICTOR: Yeah, you know,
but it's so boring to say, just go Google it. Just go Google it. Like yeah,
we all know it's on Google, but sometimes,
you just want to know. You want to punch in that
web address where you're going. You don't get any ads,
you don't get any of the other stuff. It's just that's
where I want to go. Awesome. Anything else, Simon, you
would like to leave chat with today before we go offline? SIMON: I mean,
it was great to be here. And thanks, everyone,
for watching this and I hope I got some people
excited to try out Houdini. VICTOR: I think you did. They said so,
so I'll take that as proof. Awesome. I hope you're all
staying safe out there. We will see you all again
next week at the same time. Take care, everyone.
