Vertex Animation Textures - Veils Tool

Loosely inspired by the Sirene-boss fight in Expedition 33, the concept of this tool is simple: Draw a curve in Unreal, generate a cloth-mesh on it, then click the "Generate VATs"-Button, which caches out a 100-frame looping animation and automatically generates Vertex Animation Textures, imports everything to Unreal, and creates and assigns a material instance for instant use in an environment-art pipeline.
For this project I utilized the Houdini Engine Public API, which lets you integrate your HDA's into a Blueprint environment, giving you precise control over instantiation, cooking process, usw...
I also wrote a python script, which handled the import and setup of the Vertex Animation Textures, which also runs from inside the same Blueprint, so the user has to do nothing more than press a button. (and wait about 30 seconds for the animation to cache...)
I wanted to make this tool as simple to use as possible, so I created a custom Editor Utility Widget that runs everything from instantiation and cooking of the tool to generating the cache and importing the VATs. Integrating an HDA into a Blueprint environment really brings another level of streamlining to the Houdini-Unreal workflow. I love experimenting with this sort of stuff!
If you want to learn about this tool in more detail, check out my blog post!
https://www.artstation.com/blogs/fuchs_johanna1/V9qYK/vertex-animation-textures-veils-tool-houdini-public-api