Houdini in VFX

Anyone that works on VFX games industry could give a insight how is Houdini used to create effects? Is it only for meshes?

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You can create a water sims, explosions - (I prefer EmberGen - because it is a lot faster than houdini for making explosions etc.) fracturing, making animations and exporting them as a fbx or vat’s. There’s a lot of posibilities.

Take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fnlvMpyInU

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I use it for anything really :slight_smile: But mostly, it’s generating meshes, simulating destruction, soft bodies, basically any use of vertex animation textures. Rendering for textures of anything, but most often it is volumetrics and liquids.

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Would you recommend Houdini for Unity users as well?

Why not? If it is convenient and comfortable to work in such a combination. Of course, there are other options, you can use a blender, it is open and also has many possibilities. In my opinion, there is no single right answer.

My uses of Houdini for Unreal have been:

  • Mesh generation (both for panning textures and debris chunks)
  • Flipbooks for stuff like smoke/water
  • Alembics (primarily for fluids or fracture mesh)
  • VDBs (for smoke/fog)
  • Point data caches for Niagara
  • VAT (fluid, cloth)

Note I have largely moved onto Embergen for fast iteration on smoke/dust/fire/magic flipbook generation, as I feel like it is vastly more user-friendly.

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Creating VAT in Blender or creating simulations for use in Unity is really hard. I say hard because there are almost no resources to learn. If there are, they are in text form and very hard to understand.

found an example of Blender to VAT. Worth checking out and see if you get the process.

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Thank you so much! I never came across this video