This HDA was designed to import FBX assets, process them in Houdini, and convert them into procedural animation elements that could then be exported for use in an in-house game engine.

Many proprietary engines do not provide all of the built-in tools and workflows available in more widely used engines such as Unreal Engine. Because of this, teams working with custom technology often need to develop specialized pipelines, custom tools, or alternative workflows to solve specific production problems.

Houdini is particularly useful in these situations because it can be used to build flexible procedural processing and animation pipelines around the requirements of the target engine.

For this workflow, FBX was a practical format for transferring skeletal meshes and skeletal animation between Houdini and the game engine.

The procedural animation generated in Houdini could then be further enhanced inside the engine with particles, shaders, and other real-time VFX elements to create the final effect.