Alright so I have asked a lot of vfx friends and can't get a straight answer on much except for maya. Let me give some background on this projects specs. currently I am modeling everything in modo real world scale so a character is 5'8"-6' and then I import fbx to maya to rig and animate. Talking to a rigger friend I imported it at correct scale and measured at 182.88cm in maya. Now I bring it into houdini at the same scale in each of the other programs. I have the same clipping issues that I have in maya where I would have to change the clipping plane. Now in houdini I am running into a couple problems.

1. viewport clipping plane stay at defualt and I cant see a thing unless I get close. So I create a camera and can now see everything after I change the clipping plane. Is there any way to change the default clipping plane?

2. Camera now has dolly speed issues, camera will dolly back and forth just fine for a distance and then slow down to a crawl after a certain distance from the center of the world, I can't find settings anywhere to turn it off or change the distance at which it slows down.

Maybe I am going about this the incorrect way and should scale everything down 1/100 the size? I am preparing sets and assets in houdini at the moment and don't want to set everything up incorrectly.

-James Guard

if you are coming from Maya (default unit scale is 1cm) to Houdini (default unit scale is 1m)
you should scale everything down by 100
for geometry this should be done at the geometry level (transform SOP)

Awesome, that makes sense. So then I have to ask the question is there an import setting that I am missing to import at a certain scale. I know how to scale objects by the way you described above, but I don't know how to deal with scaling down alembic files. These alembic files will have characters and camera animation.

Whats the benefit scaling on SOP compared to scaling on OBJ level?
I know that shaders look for OBJ scale.