Memories Of Glory - Houdini Tools
During my mentorship with Alex Beddows, I made the use of Houdini a cornerstone to help me solve issues and maintain flexibility and iterability on all assets.
Most of the HDA's I made were for processing sculpts and high-resolution meshes into game-ready nanite meshes based on a strict size-to-polycount chart. Poly-reduction, UVs and final prep was all done in Houdini, with HP meshes coming in straight from Zbrush. They would then be fed into Susbtance Painter to create the bitmaps required for the shader in Unreal.
Two tools stood out for their utility:
The ground-mound tool: it uses a skirt of geometry and populates it with my stone/brick sculpts from zbrush, and then makes it into one seamless mesh that is baked for shader bitmaps.
The rope-generator: it let me turn unreal splines into ropes, with proper UVs and with parameterized details such as loose fibers on its surface.
Mesh Processing Subnet in Houdini
Final processed mesh in Unreal
Ground Mound tool that uses HP sculpts for scattered debris
Variants made with the GM tool
Final meshes blending seamlessly into the scene
Rope Generator in Houdini
Demonstration in-engine using the Houdini Plugin for Unreal
Two of the final ropes used in the scene