News in the Gaming world

Houdini for Unreal Engine 4

Side Effects Software is excited to announce the release of Houdini Engine for UE4. This plug-in provides game artists and developers with access to Houdini’s award-winning procedural technology right inside the UE4 editor.
"Creating highly detailed, interactive worlds is within reach for teams of all sizes.

Unreal Engine 4 gives developers powerful procedural features which are seamlessly enhanced through the Houdini Engine integration," says Kim Libreri, CTO of Epic Games.
The plug-in lets artists load Houdini Digital Assets built using Houdini’s procedural node-based workflow into the UE4 editor with parameters and controls that can be manipulated to create custom results. Working together, Houdini and the Houdini Engine empower artists with an easy way to create their own tools that can be quickly shared with colleagues to ensure consistent high-quality results.

To enhance the creation of procedural game assets, Side Effects recently released Houdini 15 with new modeling and texturing tools. Modellers now have access to a new tweak edit workflow, edge sliding, soft selection highlighting and new tools such as PolyBridge and PolyExpand 2D – ideal for road generation. For working with hi-res models, new retopology tools make it easy to build low-res geometry by drawing right on top of high-res geometry.
“All of the modeling and texturing improvements in Houdini 15 have been developed with game artists in mind,” says Judith Crow, Director, Games Segment, Side Effects. “These tools can be used for interactive modeling in the viewport or to create procedural assets which can be loaded into the UE4 editor using the Houdini Engine plug-in.”
Houdini 15 also includes texture baking and viewport support for UDIM textures, world-space normal maps, UV mesh boundaries and overlapping UV regions. Game developers can now import and export tangent-space normal maps and convert bump and displacement maps to normal maps.