Creating Art Tools Using Houdini & Unreal Engine 5

Tool creation for games in Houdini - Tutorial Course

Learn how a professional Technical Artist creating tools for games in Houdini. You’ll learn how to approach and create tools that you will be able to use in Unreal Engine. This tutorial will teach you how to use a large catalog of surface operators in combination with Attribute wrangles to create tools. Next to this it will explain how to make a functional UI with multiple options!

HOUDINI & UNREAL ENGINE
The majority of work will be done in Houdini, For the later parts Unreal Engine will be used. 
Included with this tutorial is a Unreal 5 project, this features a basic level for implementation. Unreal will be mainly used as a testing ground to use the Houdini tools.
In this course, you will learn everything you need to know to create the final results that you see in the images and trailers. The techniques could be applied to create other tools.

4+ HOURS!
This course contains over 4+ hours of content – You can follow along with every single step – The course will be 100% real-time and does not contain any timelapses, and is fully narrated in order to understand the techniques shown.

We will start by a quick introduction into tool development, after which we will start preparing our Houdini UI. Then, we will dive into creating the Pipe tool in Houdini.
Once that is done we will start on the railing tool, we will also set up unreal engine in order to work with Houdini. Throughout the chapter we will add more and more features to our tool.

Next to this there are also 3 instructional:

• Normals - This will give an introduction into the different types of normals there are and how you can work with them.
• Attribute Wrangle - This is meant to give you an introduction into writing simple custom vex code.
• Groups - How to work with groups and how they can be used inside Houdini to create tools.

SKILL LEVEL
This game art tutorial is perfect for students who have some familiarity with procedural Node based programs such as Substance Designer or Unreal Engine Materials – Everything in this tutorial will be explained in detail. However, if you have never touched node base softwares it could be difficult to understand. A very basic understanding of Houdini is recommended, but not crucial.

TOOLS USED

• Houdini
• Houdini Engine - is needed to work inside of Unreal Engine.
• Unreal Engine

YOUR INSTRUCTOR
Hicham Ouchan is a Procedural Technical artist currently working in the Game Industry, having worked on games such as Poppy Playtime Chapter 2 & 3 and the Horizon Zero Dawn Remaster and as a Freelancer on multiple projects as a Technical Artist.

CHAPTER SORTING
If you are a beginner to very new user of Houdini I recommend the following order: Setup - Groups - Normals - Attribute wrangle - Halfpipe - Railing tool.
In case you are a more advanced user of Houdini then I would recommend the order: Setup - Halfpipe - Railing tool - Attribute wrangle - Groups - Normals.

All the videos will have logical naming to make it easy to find exactly the ones you want to follow.

SOURCEFILES
Project source files include the Houdini tools, Unreal Engine Project and Additional Instructions.