Introduction

I’ve been in the games industry since around 2000 – spending my first 12 years at Ubisoft Massive – and I’m now at MachineGames. My main 3D tools are Houdini and Modo.

UE4 and Houdini

You can work in several different ways with Houdini and UE4. In my current test project I’m using the Houdini Engine plugin in UE4, which makes it possible to create Houdini Digital Assets (HDA). These allow you to create a procedural node systems and expose values to Unreal. These values can be the amount of floors in a skyscraper, the seed value for balcony placement, etc. After placing your HDA file in the UE4 level these exposed values offer live control of the asset within UE4.

For destruction effects there is this nice tool for Houdini written by Steven Burrichter that can export simulated animations to FBX (which UE4 reads). I believe you posted some tests I did with that a couple of months ago, when I tested out a 8423 joints animation in Unreal: