You could make this super complex so it automatically sets materials up, simulates some fleshy parts that fold over the edges and so on. The major decision you have to make as an artist is what part of the mesh you want to use.

Now, this could have been wrapped into a neat HDA with exposed parameters and so on, but I’ve found that when I make a set of these meshes I often need to change the network slightly between sections. Like for the arm, I would need a different bone than the leg and for some thin pieces, I might need to add an extra fuse node. With this setup, I have all of that flexibility but by starting out from this “preset” I can get to those tweaks so much faster.

I don’t want to give up my artistic choices. I just want the tedious stuff automated, so I can produce better content faster.

Shader Compilation

Being able to copy the material from Houdini to Unreal blew my mind. It is however only a demo material so by default it will just sit there and loop through its animation to show that it works. To make it a bit more useful you can add in some features. Outside of making it work with particles like in the tutorial, I like to add in a bit of math to the frame selection part of the network. It allows me to store multiple animations in one texture and then I can select individual clips from it. This is useful if you have several animations stored in there just for variation like in this video.