Epic Games and SideFX Joining Together

Epic Games combines forces with SideFX!

Epic Games, the company that built Unreal Engine has become “a minority investor in SideFX”, the creators of Houdini.

https://www.sidefx.com/community/epic-games-invests-in-sidefx/

I’m not sure what a minority investor involves in terms of the business side of things, but I can start to imagine the possibility of future seamless addon’s, features, and functions between Houdini and Unreal Engine. The new features of UE4’s Niagara and Chao system has already made it much more powerful to build assets in Houdini and bring them into UE for realtime playback. UE4’s Chao system seems like it’s been in beta forever, but I think it’s mature enough for production now.

I was sitting on this article in draft and forgot to publish it out. And due to that, this news is quite dated. The news was announced last month.

Niagara Particles

I tried playing with UE4’s Niagara particle system by importing a vector field built in Houdini, and import it into UE4 using the Niagara system. The greatest benefit is being able to experience the vector fields in live action inside the UE4’s game engine. Exporting static assets from Houdini into UE4 has always been very seamless and isn’t anything new. The new Niagara and Chao system allows the possibility to bring a design from Houdini and run it live in UE4. UE4 has always been famous for its fast rendering engine and its amazing graphics!

Houdini Height Fields

Using Houdini’s Height Field system can easily generate HUGE landscape and terrain possibilities for game play play. This is perfect for terrains that can be used in UE4. If you export Houdini’s Height Fields as the original volume and import it directly into UE4 it’ll even export as a landscape actor in UE4.