This R&D combines Houdini and Unreal Engine to build a custom workflow/HDA for a specific rendering and environment-representation goal.

The idea comes from an older Unreal Engine 4 workflow that I revisited and recreated with a more flexible setup.

The HDA generates a simplified environment shell from a 360° camera view, keeping only the geometry that is actually hit by the camera rays and removing the unnecessary parts. The resulting shell can then be exported into Unreal Engine.

This creates a very lightweight representation of the surrounding environment, making it a cheap way to capture and reuse large areas without keeping the full original geometry.

Conceptually, it is somewhat similar to working with Mesh Distance Fields, but with much more direct control because the result exists as actual geometry. That means it can also be used for additional Niagara, shader, masking, sampling, and interaction workflows.

The main idea is essentially a custom rendering/projection technique: only the polygons intersected by the camera rays are preserved, producing a simplified shell of the visible environment.