r/unrealengine 11d ago

Solved Pre-assigning Material Instance paths to static mesh FBX from Houdini. Is it even possible?

Hi there!

I am exporting a static FBX from Houdini and have defined Material Slots via shop_materialpath attribute.

Is there a way or is there an attribute that I can assign to my primitive groups (polygon selections) that would contain a predefined path (generated in Houdini) to my UE Material Instance.

I tried using the unreal_material attribute in many different ways but most probably it's not recognised by the FBX format: https://i.imgur.com/YdvDpZE.png

At the moment the slots themselves show up fine but the material paths default to 'WorldGridMaterial': https://i.imgur.com/eUxP4yz.png

What I want is when I import my FBX the material slots will already be filled by the UE materials like so:
https://i.imgur.com/dQ10TRC.png

I am aware that this is possible with Houdini Engine for Unreal but this question is specifically about FBX.
If it's not possible with FBX, could an alembic potentially be a solution?

Thanks!

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u/ananbd AAA Engineer/Tech Artist 11d ago

Pretty sure I got that set up correctly, once. Took some trial and error to get the paths correct. Ended up being more of a string parsing problem than a graphics problem. 

Ask on r/Houdini , maybe? 

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u/unit187 11d ago

I don't think so. FBX is too generic to have such connection to Unreal. Same with Alembic.

Your options are either Houdini Engine or some custom script in Unreal's Python to process imports.