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Welcome to the Houdini Engine For Unreal Version2 Alpha!

Version 2 is a significant rewrite of the core architecture of the existing Houdini Engine plugin, and comes with many new features, and improvements.

The main focus of this Alpha is to ensure proper compatibility with version 1 workflows and tools, therefore, not all of the new version 2 features are available in the Alpha. Noticeably, Alpha1 does not have full PDG and Blueprint support yet.

Here are some of the new features and improvements available in Alpha 1:

• New and redesigned core architecture, more modular and lightweight.   All the Houdini Engine / HAPI logic is now contained into a new Editor-only module, removing the need to bake HDA before packaging a game.
• Static Mesh creation time has been optimized and now uses Mesh Descriptions.   Alternatively, you can also decide to use an even faster Proxy Mesh generation while editing the HDA,   that can automatically be refined to Static Mesh, either on a timer, or when saving/playing the level.
• bgeo files can be imported natively in the content browser.
• Basic World composition support:   Tiled height fields can now be imported as multiple landscapes in separate levels and added to World Composition.
• HDA parameters and inputs editing now support multi-selection.
• Inputs have received a variety of improvements:   - Colliders on a Static Mesh are now imported as group geometry.   - World inputs can now read data from brushes.   - Instancers and Foliage are imported as packed primitives.   - World inputs have an improved bound selector mode, that lets them send all the actors and objects contained in the bounds of the selected object.   - World inputs can now import data from all supported input objects (landscape, houdini asset actors..)   - World inputs can now import data from a different level than the HDA.   - A single curve input can now create and import any number of curves.   - You can alt-click on the curve inputs or editable to create new points.
• Parameter UI/UX has been improved:   - Folder UI (tabs, collapsible) has been improved   - Ramps UI has been improved, and it is easy to turn off auto-update while editing them.   - When an asset is dropped on a string parameter, it automatically sets its value to the asset's reference.

As the plugin now relies on native UProperties for serialization, operations like cut and paste, move between level, duplication etc..

Compatibility:

Currently, the Alpha1 release of V2 has binaries that have been built for UE4.24.3 and Houdini 18.0.416. Source code for the plugin is available for UE4.24, and the master branch of Unreal (4.26), 4.25 sources and binaries will be added soon.

Version 2 does not support backward compatibility with assets created by version 1 of the Houdini Engine for Unreal plugin. To that extent, it is important that you use version 2 of the plug-in only with projects that do not contain version 1 assets.

However, Houdini Digital Assets (HDA files) that were created for version 1 of the plugin will be compatible with version 2, as it supports most of version 1 workflows.