Is there any way to actually get a Houdini-exported Alembic with instances to load as instances in Maya? I've been trying for hours and can't get anything to work.

For example, I'd expect a basic copy sop (set to pack and instance) + an alembic rop set to “use instances when possible”, to actually import as instances in Maya. All I'm getting are duplicates that aren't actually Maya instances.

It sounds like its a limitation with Maya's Alembic importer, but I thought it was worth checking here. Anyone have any ideas?

Have you tried rolling it into a quick HDA and loading it via Houdini Engine?

i'm hazy on the details, but we got this to work by swapping the autodesk alembic plugin for the one from the alembic website. That was a few years ago though, I would have hoped the autodesk one would support instancing by now.

Running through engine works well. I can either have regular Maya instances, or use a particle instancer, which is nice. Unfortunately what I'm doing requires a camera as input, which isn't supported by engine in Maya.

I also went ahead and built the latest Alembic from source, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to help for me. Same result as the plugin shipped with maya.. no instances

Another option I tried was to export “as instances” from houdini, which at least gets me a separate transform per copy, that I can then replace with actual Maya instances. Works fine under ~10000 instances but takes far too long to process outside of that. And trying to export transform data only with the Alembic ROP (“Create Shape Nodes” disabled) crashes Houdini (2 latest stable builds), so I haven't been able to test any workflow using that data yet.

Hi marvolo, I have a same problem like you said, any ideas now?