I am working on a project where we have a bunch of sand simulations. At the moment, our Houdini artist is exporting Pointcloud caches in Alembic, so that we can import them into Unity via the Alembic importer, and spawn meshes on the points of the cloud within Unity, using the native components (Alembic Point Cloud and Alembic Points Renderer) rather than him exporting all the mesh, which would be SUPER heavy.
Following the instructions of the Alembic package, it all seems pretty easy, except that right now, I’ve only managed to make this “render” in 2019.1.14 (the project is in 2020.2.2 & 2020.3.3). Basically, by default, a “DefaultPoint” material will be assigned to the mesh via the Alembic Pointcloud Renderer component, but it doesn’t actually render anything in the Game View. I can only see the MotionVector material in the scene view. This “DefaultPoint” material is made with a shader that comes from the Alembic package. I’ve tried making different materials, but nothing seems to work. I also get this random cube that appears automatically, but that’s not my priority right now
In 2019.1.14, the default material seems to work, the camera can see it, it reacts to the light, it’s just very limited. But we’re not working in 2019.1.14, so I still need a fix…
Do any of you guys have any insight into rendering Alembic pointclouds into Unity? Here are some screenshots of the 2020.2.3 project. Settings for the 2019.1.14 project are the same, I’ve included a screenshot as well (last one) of what it looks like when it’s “working”.
Thanks for the post.
I just checked that it worked on 2021.2 Legacy render pipeline.
Unfortunately the instanced point materials are not compatible with HDRP (or SRP)
This was not requested since the interest in alembic point clouds is not terrible.
I will try to add it on our radar and see what can be done.
Thanks for the fast reply! I’m at least glad that I’m not the one who was missing out on a setting somewhere.
Thank you very much! I’ll be keeping an eye out for it
Actually, replying again. Do you have any suggestions and/or workarounds for this type of situation? Is there another way to transfer this kind of simulation from Houdini to Unity that you know of?
Unfortunately the most straight forward, but crazy inefficient, way would be to expose your sand as a mesh.
Alternatively, Houdini offers a Unity plugin. I have never used myself. https://www.sidefx.com/docs/unity/_instancing.html
Thanks for your message.
We are in the process of planning the features for 2022.2 and this is one of the items.
Unfortunately I do not have any more info on the matter.
If I may ask, what sort of alembic point cloud data are you trying to render inside HDRP ?
