I was wondering if post processing meshes in Unreal using HE is a viable workflow. The use case is that different artists produce meshes in different packages. Each model will need some cleanup (deletion of hidden polygons for example) and a baked texture (a packed image of curvatures at different scales). Instead of solving these problems for every single package used in modeling I figured it would be simpler to do this work in a unified way inside Unreal since the editor is running anyway.

The ideal workflow would be like I select Table_mesh_raw in the content browser, start HE which digests that mesh, modifies it, bakes it's texture and outputs Table_mesh and Table_curvature assets. (Overwriting existing assets.)

Is something like that possible? EDIT: Not just possible but practical?

Yup, that is a super common workflow in Unreal and Houdini! Editing or creating variations of assets is very easy to do with Houdini, and Houdini Engine lets you run those tools as HDAs directly in Unreal.

Oh cool! I've been looking for a tutorial for asset post-processing but couldn't find any. Do you know one perhaps?

I'm mostly worried about the organization side of things: since we'll need to work with the processed assets (place them on the level, reference them in Blueprints, etc) we need control over their name and location on the folder structure. Having the stuff with an ever changing hash as name in some hidden folder wouldn't work for us.

Michael Pavlovich has a great "Game Dev" series on this on youtube.
There is also "Indie Pixel" for some more Houdini Engine related content on Youtube. It's a mix of free and paid content.
And I have to include Simon Verstraete as well. His Art Station is a great resource

And you would have full control of naming and output folders with Houdini Engine. The Houdini Engine for Unreal documentation is a great resource for all the little pipeline details. https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/unreal/index.html [www.sidefx.com]

Great, thank you! I'll dig in.