dpernuit
commented
4 years ago Hi Alex,
Sorry for the late reply, I thought I'd already replied to you earlier...
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Regarding bake to foliage, the ability to create foliage instances without baking was added to Alpha2. For that, you need to add the "unreal_foliage" primitive/detail attribute to your instancer, with the value set to 1. Foliage instances will be updated as you recook, like with regular instancers.
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Regarding world composition, the current alpha had a rough support for it, that required your heightfields to have the unreal_world_composition attribute, for that mode to be enabled. I didn't comment much on it, as we've decided to completely revamp the way world composition work in v2 for the next update.
With the new version, WC is automatically handled when baking tiled landscapes (if the current world has world composition enabled). The plugin automatically creates the needed sub levels (with the option to manually set them via the unreal_level_path attribute), create the landscape streaming proxy in those levels, and updates/rescan WC. If the levels already exist, the landscapes in them are automatically updated.
I'm also currently adding support for that unreal_level_path attributes to other outputs generated by the plugin, so you can, for example, have instances be created in the landscape tile's sublevel (instead of generating everything in the persistent level).
As for importing multiple landscapes with one input, world inputs have the ability to import landscapes in v2, and could be used for importing multiple landscape tiles as HF.
I'll get back to you on those two bugs.
Alpha 1 Feedback Set #2
Ok this was mostly foliage and world composition focused.
-Bake to foliage did work (replace is a bit confusing as terminology, I thought it was the feature I mentioned before where placed foliage was auto updated ) -Having it auto place into foliage nad get updated would be HUGE. Definitely looking forward to this
-World composition (phrasing was weird in the documentation I was unsure of what the new feature actually is. Importing support from UE4 to Houdini via input parameters, or back the other way, imported in Houdini via outside sources then just dynamically created in Unreal) I was unable to plug in multiple level proxies as a single input (guessing I need multiple inputs, one for each proxy??). I was however able to select 2 streaming proxies in the world outliner which did go into Houdini correctly (as landscapes even, not geo) though I did run into the bug described below
I tried the inverse where I plugged in a landscape and it generated out tiles which seemed to work as separate landscapes but it didn't at first glance put them into the world composition system. I also tried baking it out as a level which seemed to work but it wasn't detected by world composition at all. (SCREENSHOT_02)
This means that both use cases I could think of (imporitng and combining multiple tiles together, and generating new tiles) didn't work.
For me, and the pipeline my team is currently working on it is by far the former that is way more important. The ability to process world composition tiles easily when sampling to scatter instanced content, and the pipeline around it is paramount. Currently our plan is (since this tool isn't out yet) to export the tiles manually from Unreal to save on disk, then have our tools read back the disk cached heightfields as we need them. I think an ideal system would be some kind of auto selection of components to export within a volume or custom landscape input you could then use to scatter things on (though PDG does help that problem when it comes online in the future (something we are looking forward to).
But yeah TLDR, both use cases I tried of world comp didn't seem to work as expected, sampling from world comp streaming proxies and generating content accross tiles and placing them in the right level is the base feature we really need (similar to how UE4's procedural foligae system works)
BUGS -When using 2 levels imported from the outliner as inputs (ATTACHED_HDA_01) that were both level streaming proxies (SCREENSHOT_01), the HDA seemed to not generate the instanced cubes accross both terrains.
It did for one, but seemed to not place them across the border to the second proxy. I also opened up the scene live and apparently it wasn't generating a correct second input (DEBUGHIP_01). I've attached It for you guys to poke around with.
-I did have one crash trying to import in some world comp tiles into a scene with an existing landscape that was already hooked up into an HDA. I've included it (CRASHDUMP_01)
Attached_HDA_01.zip CRASHDUMP_01.zip DEBUGHIP_01.zip