Houdini Engine for Unity is a Unity plug-in that allows deep integration of Houdini technology into Unity through the use of Houdini Engine.
This fork is the pre-production plugin version by Aaron T. Carter from Arkaen Solutions.
This fork was started because the official plugin from SideFx has aged and seemingly fallen
into a state of stagnation, possibly because there aren't .NET/Unity specialists in-house to
currently work on and maintain it, but the plugin is fundamentally good and has powerful potential.
The goals of this fork are to:
- Update code base to current C#/Unity standards and best practices
- Make a serviceable and more maintainable plugin codebase for future development
- Attempt to rectify bugs, performance issues and any problems found
- Enhance plugin speed/efficiency and reduce memory footprints in RAM and on disk
- Ensure we have a stable, sound plugin we can fix and work with in production
- Tie up any loose ends left in the plugin's source
- Update plugin to accomodate Entities/ECS development and other recent Unity technologies
Make sure you have the correct Houdini build installed (generally one of the most recent daily builds).
Check the current development version in the file: HEU_HoudiniVersion.cs
(located at Plugins/HoudiniEngineUnity/Scripts/HEU_HoudiniVersion.cs).
Make sure same Houdini build is installed or import only the HEU_HoudiniVersion.cs
from your local Unity package to patch over it and use a different version.
This plug-in brings Houdini's powerful and flexible procedural workflow into Unity through Houdini Digital Assets. Artists can interactively adjust the asset's parameters inside Unity, and use Unity geometries as an asset's inputs. Houdini's procedural engine will then "cook" the asset and the results will be available right inside Unity.
The easiest way for artists to access the plug-in is to download the latest production build of Houdini and install the Unity plug-in along with the Houdini interactive software. Houdini Digital Assets created in Houdini can then be loaded into Unity through the plug-in. A growing library of Digital Assets for use in Unity will be available at the Orbolt Smart 3D Asset Store.
For more information:
For support and reporting bugs:
Currently, the supported Unity versions are:
- 2018.1 and newer
- Fork this repository to your own Github account using the Fork button at the top.
- Clone the forked repository to your file system.
- Download and install the correct build of Houdini. You must have the exact build number and version as HOUDINI_MAJOR, HOUDINI_MINOR, and HOUDINI_BUILD int values in Plugins/HoudiniEngineUnity/Scripts/HEU_HoudiniVersion.cs. You can get the correct build from: http://www.sidefx.com/download/daily-builds (you might need to wait for the build to finish and show up if you're updating to the very latest version of the plugin)
- Open a project in Unity. Note that if a previous version of the plugin exists in the project (usually located at Assets/Plugins/HoudiniEngineUnity), then you'll need to remove it from the Unity project. To do so, in Unity, in the Project browser, right-click on HoudiniEngineUnity folder in Assets/Plugins and select Delete.
- Copy the Plugins/HoudiniEngineUnity folder from the cloned repository from step 2, and paste it into your Unity project's Assets/Plugins folder. If the Plugins folder exists, you can simply merge with it.
- Restart Unity.
- Ensure Houdini Engine loaded successfully by going to the "HoudiniEngine" top menu and selecting "Installation Info" and making sure all the versions match.