SideFx software just announced the release of Houdini Engine for Unreal. Houdini is a long standing procedurally based 3D modeling, animating and rendering application which was until recently a fairly poor fit for game development. With Houdini 15 they added the following game oriented features:
To enhance the creation of procedural game assets, Side Effects recently released Houdini 15 with new modeling and texturing tools. Modellers now have access to a new tweak edit workflow, edge sliding, soft selection highlighting and new tools such as PolyBridge and PolyExpand 2D – ideal for road generation. For working with hi-res models, new retopology tools make it easy to build low-res geometry by drawing right on top of high-res geometry.
“All of the modeling and texturing improvements in Houdini 15 have been developed with game artists in mind,” says Judith Crow, Director, Games Segment, Side Effects. “These tools can be used for interactive modeling in the viewport or to create procedural assets which can be loaded into the UE4 editor using the Houdini Engine plug-in.”
Houdini 15 also includes texture baking and viewport support for UDIM textures, world-space normal maps, UV mesh boundaries and overlapping UV regions. Game developers can now import and export tangent-space normal maps and convert bump and displacement maps to normal maps. For a complete list of Houdini 15 enhancements, go to www.sidefx.com/H15 and for tutorials go to www.sidefx.com/start_here.
Houdini Engine for Unreal is available now in Houdini Indie, Houdini and Houdini FX versions. You can read more about the release here.