Bringing Houdini-Made Crowds Into Unreal Engine 5
Máté Petrányi shared some experiments.
Houdini & Unreal Engine Specialist Máté Petrányi has been exploring Houdini crowd simulations and developed a workflow for bringing skeletal animated crowds into Unreal Sequencer.
He created an HDA that extracts the root motion of each agent and saves it to a JSON file, while exporting all animations without the root motion. He also built an Editor Utility Widget that generates a Level Sequence and populates it with Blueprint actor instances, applying animations and transforms from the JSON data.
Máté then continued his crowd experiments, designing a race scenario in which the last participant standing celebrates with a cheer.
"The hardest part was handling the animation triggers and blends. I wanted the agents to start jumping at the optimal moment, so I ended up writing a lot of custom triggers to play the right animation based on which leg was currently forward. It was a nice project to learn more about RBD impact detection, path following, agent transition graphs, custom animation triggers, and ragdoll motors", commented the developer.
If you're interested in Máté Petrányi's workflow, you can reach out to him for the Houdini-to-UE5 Sequencer solution. Don't forget to subscribe to our Newsletter and join our 80 Level Talent platform, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
