Houdini Engine Plugin for Unity3D - Impressive!

My jaw is still on the floor, check it out.
Not sure about cost or licensing but hopefully we'll know more about it soon.

http://vimeo.com/72319223

 

Holy krap, that lady is boring.

 

Holy crap, that lady is boring.²

For game assets though, Blender is enough in most cases imho, only 3dsMax is better because of the plugins. (Vray, Texture Baking, UV Mapping, auto LOD models, etc.)

 

@Nossgrr great find. Thanks

I think the lady has done a wonderful job, perfect in fact.

Any idea on how much this going to cost? And when will it be released?

 

The point about this is to make use of Houdini's procedural workflow in game development. One artist creates an configurable asset which has a ton of settings and then the level artists can quickly create variations of the asset in Unity by tweaking the exposed settings without having to go back to the 3D software, alter it by hand and export it again.

It could be something as simple as an ornate railing which you want a configurable height without having it's details stretched by scaling, or something as complicated as a single bridge asset which can be configured to be a suspension bridge or a stone bridge with arches or a wooden bridge, each type completely configurable with settings like length, width and height; number and type of towers and cables; number of arches and type of stonework; plank sizes, broken planks and rope tension. Another use case is for driving games, where a road asset is used to create the course based on a path defined in Unity, a basic asset can be used to start and, as the Houdini artist improves and makes changes to the base asset, the new version can be dropped in without breaking the layout in the Unity scene.

Making the procedural asset is certainly far more complicated than making an equivalent static asset in more typical 3D software, but it saves a lot of time hand tweaking assets and can allow that single asset to be reused numerous times but have a lot of variation to it. It's effectively like a 3D version of Substances. It also means all the level designers on the project don't have to be as talented 3D artists as the person who made the asset if they need to alter the asset to fit an area of a level.

 

I saw this around here already not long ago. It's an amazing tool they're building there and I am eager to give it a try.
Unless it is windows only. If no Mac version it is no go for me.

 

Houndini is available on Windows, OSX and Linux so I'm sure Houdini Engine will be available for all three platforms.

 

Man, that's exactly the kind of thing I need right now, too. Ugh. It always seems like my needs are a few months ahead of technology.

And yes, she's pretty freaking boring. Her voice is nice enough, but she's clearly not excited about this, and she's talking rather slowly. ... Actually, she seems to be sounding more interested after a few minutes. But man, that start was rough.

 

To be honest it sounds like she's trying to do a flat, professional pitch rather video rather than a casual "OMG LOOK AT THIS AWESOME STUFF" type video. I guess it also doesn't help that it sounds like she's got an awful cold which is making her lose her voice, judging by the repeated coughing through out.

 

We also have an asset store called Orbolt [http://www.orbolt.com] which will have a growing library of assets...

OR

...assets could also go up on the Unity asset store as well. This way the collective wisdom of the community can be pooled and artists can work faster.

 

I whipped up a quick video about digital assets in Houdini, and procedural workflows. I'm sure you can see how fast it is to tweak things once an asset is properly setup. Imagine if you needed a forest of trees, you could create one procedural tree, and generate variants of the tree in Unity. Nice

[video=youtube_share;aOzsahrLaBs]http://youtu.be/aOzsahrLaBs

 

Introducing the excellent adventures of Dave Joe.

3DS Max

Day 1.
Dave: Hey, Joe, we need a wizard's tower to stick on this hill.
Joe: Sounds cool, gimme a day or so.

Day 3.
Joe: Here you go.
Dave: Lovely! But bad news - we need 30 towers, but they have to be all different...the designer wants wonky style towers, some with no windows, some with lots of windows, some with flags on top and some with different style roofs. What do you reckon?

Joe: Oh. Ok.. I'll take a look, it might take a while - it's doable, maybe a few days to a week or so?

Day 10.
Joe: Here you go... these ok?
Dave: Cool. Can we make some changes?
Joe: (sigh). Sure...

Houdini

Day 1.
Dave: Hey, Joe, we need a wizard's tower to stick on this hill.
Joe: Sounds cool, gimme a day or so.

Day 3.
Joe: Here you go. And I did a whole bunch of different styles
Dave: Lovely! But the designer wants 30 different towers, can we do that?
Joe: Sure... you see these sliders?

 

This would be nice for particles too... I used to play around with ICE in Softimage and wished it was in game engines, since it was all node based...

 

Looks awesome. Would make generating unique buildings and other basic static objects that pretty much waste your time making much much easier and quicker. My concern is the price. Their current pipelines are priced at $1,995+. If they intend to price Houdini Engine at that same range then you can forget it as it wouldn't be priced for the indie crowd at all.

 

Content can be created in the free Houdini Apprentice. The Houdini Engine plugin won't be those kinds of prices - they want two things from this; to increase the skills-base and pool of houdini artists, and expand their market reach. Houdini is amazing, but reasons to learn it, outside the vfx business, have been fairly limited historically....this could change all of that.

If anything is going to have a price tag, I imagine it will be the API (which the plugins are written with) licensing for bespoke use.

 

Houdini Apprentice doesn't do 90% of us any good. I would favor most here are here to go commercial on mobile or PC. Houdini Apprentice is for students and it says so directly below.

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=589&Itemid=221

Even the $99/Year version can't be used commercially. So it's useless at a $1,995 price point to the indie community.

 

Apprentice and Apprentice HD (previously known as The Starving Artist Edition -- not just for students) can be used to create HDAs (Houdini Digital Assets), which are what Houdini Engine reads.

The License terms state specifically that you can create and sell HDAs through the Orbolt Store.

http://www.orbolt.com/faq/question/...l-assets-houdini-apprentice-and-apprentice-hd

More info (and a suggestion that HDAs may be made available through Unity Asset Store):

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/190169-Houdini-Engine

Edit: silly me, the Asset Store mention is a few posts above...

 

So in other words you create assets and sell it to yourself on the store?

Oh joy. That's weird.

 

That says specifically the Orbolt Store. It doesn't say anything about using what you create directly in your commercial game. If it can be used commercially why don't they just say so. It's confusing and a major contradiction to say directly on the Apprentice page it can't be used commercially then say it can in their store. The reason for this is they take a cut from the Orbolt Store so they allow it as they can make money from free users contributions. I doubt they'll allow you to sell on the Asset Store, because they don't make any profit from it as the cut goes to Unity.

In short until they clear up this license nonsense or lower the price I'm not touching it with a 10 foot pole nor should any other indie developer.

 

It is confusing, and to be fair you're not the first person (be any stretch) that's gotten the wrong end of the stick over it.

If you go to download Apprentice, read the actual License Agreement (before hitting Accept), it's explained there. One of the Sidefx guys backed this up here in the forum previously, but I agree they should make it much clearer at the source as they're losing a lot of wind out their PR efforts from what are pretty basic misunderstandings.

Artists have had to deal with companies bleeding them dry over the years, and getting very little back in return for their time, effort and - when paying the big bucks - money. Trust me, Side Effects is not one of those companies. If you can put the well-earned cynicism aside, there's a whole new world of 3D that you didn't even realise exists out there, and it doesn't have shareholders.

 

I see, that clears it up a little bit, but I'll wait and see what comes of the official Houdini Engine release. Hopefully they'll clean up the license jargon.

 

LOL indeed.. i would have been 10x exited with no audio. Sorry babe, but its true.. bad choice whatever the reason..

 

I got a chance to see it in person at siggraph it was really awesome , it needed some tweaking but the ways they could manipulate and tweak the geometry were amazing. I can't wait for someone to recreate the inception "city-bending" scene in unity!