 Howdy guys, IndiePixel here, so I wanted to show off a tool that I wrote a couple years ago called ProTrack and it was a tool set that basically sat on top of the Houdini engine. So I wrote a you know quite a bit of C sharp code to interact with the Houdini engine API. I wrote a bunch of editor tools as you see here and what it did is it allowed you to create race tracks relatively quickly and you know while the the concept here was relatively basic you know you had oval oval track type thing even though you could have open ended tracks as well so you could do something more like like a dirt type track where it just goes from end to end. The idea was really to start to explore like what we could do with the Houdini engine inside of Unity and this was back in I think the beginning of you know it was more like the end of 2013. You know in the first few versions of the Houdini engine I really wanted to mess around with it and it was fun and so here you can see I'm just going and refining a curve and placing a track and the whole time the terrain is you know constantly being snapped to the particular track. Now this particular terrain isn't terrain isn't a Unity terrain it is a mesh that's being produced by the Houdini engine so it's you know it's a mesh if you're exported out it would just be no vj type of of mesh so it's not it's not a Unity terrain and so basically here you just go as you know a user of the tool itself and you lay out your track and then it starts adjusting your terrain to however you wanted it and you actually had quite a few controls. It was an interesting case study into just how far you could take the the Houdini engine and I don't think you know a lot of people are exploring this aspect of the Houdini engine maybe at some of the more AAA studios where they have teams of programmers because you know this took me about a month I think to make you know in terms of setting everything up inside of Houdini and then getting all my tools working properly inside of the Houdini engine for Unity and then building all the editors so that way designers and stuff like that could use the tool in a really you know quick and efficient iterative fashion they could be designers and they didn't have to you know know a lot about working with stuff inside of Unity they could just lay down a curve use the editor tools and start building a track right so that was kind of the the goal for building ProTrack and you know we put it up on the asset store and it did pretty good the the issue that we ended up dealing with is that you know you have to have the the Houdini engine on on your your end basically in order for the tools to work right so you have to have a license of the Houdini engine or Houdini indie or effects or core right you have to have all that so if you don't then you know the tool doesn't work so it was it was kind of a rough a rough ride around that particular stuff so that the tool itself also took care of you know allowing designers to quickly pick you know procedural tool that they wanted to start to place on the track and in this case what I'm doing is I'm building a guardrail right so and this is you know at the end of the day this is just an otl that the editor tool is instantiating but what's happening is what the c-charp code did is it it would feed in the curve to the actual otl so if you're familiar with working with the Houdini engine you know if you just work with it in its kind of stock format right it's its base format you yourself have to draw the curve and then attach the hd a to it and you know you're doing a lot of dragging and dropping and there's a lot of scene management going on and even in this and you can see that the hierarchy view already has tons of stuff in it so what the protract tool set did was it wrapped the Houdini engine and gave it a nice little interface allowed you to build these procedural assets really quickly and you know it was a really cool concept and it really worked really well and we I mean we got a few sales from it all and stuff like that which was great people were really interested in it was just hard to keep up with the constant changing of the versions of the Houdini engine and that's starting to slow down now nowadays you know now that we're a few years into it and stuff like that and but this is the type of stuff you can do with the Houdini engine and c-sharp so I'm making this video specifically for one of the youtube subscribers who asked if you could create procedural levels with the Houdini engine and unity and c-sharp and the answer is yeah you can it really comes down into how you're going to architect all this stuff together so for me when I started this you know I kind of started to break it down into you know large tools like terrain and road right and then I had a bunch of detail type of otls or what what we like to call more nowadays is HDAs right the Houdini digital asset and so I broke it down and once I had a good kind of overall idea of you know what kind of HDAs I wanted to produce I went into Houdini and started creating a whole system that kind of worked with so all the HDAs kind of work with each other right you could feed the terrain into the road right and then you feed the terrain and the road into the detail stuff and so that is how I started to architect this stuff and then when I brought it all into unity I built a c-sharp wrapper like I said before around all this stuff and added the the editors and it just sped up the workflow so you're not dragging and dropping a ton so that's basically you know a good lookout what you could do with the Houdini engine and a little bit of c-sharp and unity editors to create procedural levels and you could totally randomize this just by providing a you know seed value so let's take a look you know I produced a lot of tracks with this over the test so what I did is I also created a nice little car controller and so let's take a look at that and you can see that the procedural track you know totally holds up you can drive it you can come out of play mode and stuff like that and edit it some more so the Houdini engine is super powerful that way you can totally use it as like a layout tool and there's big everything down right if you want to get more advanced you can do something like you know protrack and try to do do a lot of the scene management yourself with c-sharp and the editor tools and keep it live all the time kind of thing just keep in mind that when the game actually does get built the Houdini engine these days will strip out all the Houdini engine code so it does just at the end of the day just become a static model which is what we want anyways right so yeah I'll just let this place more and I think yeah the next clip here I'm going to transition and show just you know how the scene is all set up it's pretty basic stuff a bunch of triggers and you know stuff like that this is all down in unity I think like five like the first version unity five it doesn't even say it on the top but uh it was you know back in the day yeah so I have a bunch of you know trigger boxes that just triggered the direction calls and stuff like that so yeah good examples of building you know procedural track and the nice thing about protrack is you could really just get in there and you know in the matter of I would say a couple hours you could build like three four tracks you know test them out the cool thing that you is that you can go in and out of play mode and test it out and when you're in edit mode you're just moving the points around and stuff like the guardrails go with it and the road and all the the foliage and stuff so that is what I wanted to show in this video let me know if you have any questions and thanks so much