Houdini Simulations into Roblox Studio

[JamesNoot]

Hello Fellow VFX or CG Devs!

Currently, I’m learning how to do Houdini FX by Side FX, and I was wondering if it’s possible to get creations from within Houdini FX into Roblox studio to help with the making of VFX and particles for games.

If there is no solution, then I’ll submit it as a feature request as being able to have the support for sophisticated simulations in Roblox like.

FLIP Fluids, Smoke & Combustion sims, Soft body rigid dynamic buildings, etc. in Roblox will be a huge plus when it comes to intense game development.

Update: I create a thread on Engine Request so please read it if you’re interested:

Houdini Support

As a Roblox developer, I like the current particle system and how creative you can be with it, but the main problem I have with it is you’re limited by coding a script to create custom particles that amaze people. Now, for the average developer, coding in Lua can be easy or hard, but I’d like to see Houdini Support integrated into the game engine. This will consist of allowing VFX developers for games to upload simulations they’ve made from a simulation engine like Houdini FX (Most Popular), A…

Thanks.

[TheGh0stRunner]

The only things I can imagine you being able to import into Roblox out of anything you suggested are rigid body physics by baking the simulation into keyframes and importing the motion into roblox studio, or soft body simulations by baking the geometry for each frame and “playing” the meshes for each frame in sequence. Everything you mentioned in your Houdini thread is easily 5+ years out when considering the limitations of the current Roblox engine considering mesh deformation isn’t even a feature that’s been implemented yet, let alone complex simulations. The engine request thread is borderline frivolous because of how intense and relatively unnecessary the tech even is when comparing it to the typical Roblox development workflow. In short, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

(edit: I hadn’t looked much at the engine features thread you made, but it looks like you’re suggesting Roblox add Houdini support directly into their engine, which doesn’t make any sense to me because Houdini isn’t a real-time rendering engine. What you’re effectively suggesting is that Roblox add support for a non-real-time rendering engine to operate within a real-time game engine—and the only real-time capabilities that Houdini has are in the form of baking each element into a sequence of frames and porting it to whatever program you use, which is what I mentioned above anyway. I don’t think this is a practical or realistic suggestion.)

[JamesNoot]

So, it’s like when Roblox allowed us to import mesh objects, we need to import .OBJ or .FBX files and they can only be so many triangles, etc.

Well, this will be like that but you can upload a .vdb file for a cloud element or similar for other effects in Houdini.

That’s what I meant when adding Houdini support.

[TheGh0stRunner]

.vdb files are for volumetrics, which is something the Roblox engine isn’t even close to being able to handle at the moment.

[JamesNoot]

Unless, a lot of developers ask for support on my post, and Roblox can start working on the Technology on advanced sims & particles.

It only takes a movement of developers to start getting featured we thought would never exist until at least 10+ years down the line.

[TheGh0stRunner]

Houdini is a very expensive program that has little application in the Roblox development process; I would think that suggestions for support are a waste of time because of the sheer amount of work to implement and the extreme few who would benefit.