Product work
This week I focused mainly on product work, namely on the procedural house assembly. I also attended a Houdini masterclass offered for the VFX minor within CMGT.
I started to experiment with the method I chose last week. I used the "Labs, Building from Patterns" tool within Houdini. This tool allows to create placeholder building modules within Houdini that can later be replaced with other modules in Unreal Engine. According to the Houdini masterclass teacher, although complex, the tool also allows for a great visual diversity and customization.
From the start I had a lot of issues with getting the Houdini Engine work within Unreal Engine. I found out that the problem was a compatibility issue of the Unreal Engine version and the Houdini Engine version. Since Houdini keeps its changelog (record of all notable changes made to a project (Wikipedia contributors, 2023)) public, for future, this could be avoided by checking the compatibility via the changelog page on the SideFX website.
Another issue that I encountered was that the Unreal Engine modules that I was referencing in Houdini were not used in Unreal Engine. The mistake I made was to give all the references within Houdini a different name and path, whereas I should have used the same dedicated name "unreal_instance" to them all but with a different path.
Once I figured the previous issue, another one appeared. The module rotation was wrong.
I managed to figure out what causes the issue. The modules that I was using were using a different orientation than the Houdini placeholder planes.
I researched and tested multiple possible solutions, such as:
Changing the orientation of the placeholder planes in Houdini
Trying to reorient the modular meshes in Unreal Engine
Unfortunately, I could not solve the issue and I will focus next week on trying to find a solution.
References
Wikipedia contributors. (2023, November 7). Changelog. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changelog
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