Feasibility of generating these outside of Houdini?

[andybak]

These are very impressive - however I'm not a Houdini user and I'm curious whether the format is clearly documented enough for it to be possible to generate these procedurally directly within Unity (or by some other means).

Do you have any thoughts on this?

[alexr4]

This should be doable but not without a lot of refactoring. The shaders are based on the one provided by SideFX in their Game Tool so they match how Houdini creates their VAT. If you want to create a unity module to export FBX/Alembic into VAT you will need to first write the whole module but also write a custom shader then update the VATUtils to support your new shader.

@gaxil as provided a great repo on how to export VAT from alembic using Unity https://github.com/Gaxil/Unity-AlembicToVAT He is also providing a great explanation for the shader part. You can create your module and shader with it then update the package to support your custom VAT system

[andybak]

The shaders are based on the one provided by SideFX in their Game Tool so they match how Houdini creates their VAT.

I guess what I was asking was "Does Houdini document the format of their VAT well enough to create them outside of Houdini?"

I'm aware of VAT as a general concept and I've played with a couple of Unity reimplementations. But I'm specifically interested in the stuff here I've not seen elsewhere like the dynamic remeshing.

[alexr4]

Each VAT method can found in their own repository https://github.com/sideeffects/GameDevelopmentToolset but I think it's more a licence question to be able to create such a tool outside Houdini. Also their VAT implement additional data which can be grabbed from various attribute, this in a lot bounds to the Houdini context