Hi,

I'm kind of new to Houdini, I'm transitioning from other 3D packages so I decided to open this thread to probably ask a lot of questions specially about look-deving and lighting,. I'll be using Houdini mainly as scene assembling tool for now.
Sorry if my questions are to dumb I'll do my best to look for answers online before posting them here.

The first thing I would like to ask is, when importing alembic files from Maya, how do you unpack them to have access to different properties of each part of an asset?
For example, if I have an alembic containing parts of the asset that need render subdivision and other parts of the asset don't need to be subdivided, how do you control this? I already know how to assign different material to different parts, but this is something that I don't know how to approach.

I guess the answer would be the same, but I'd like to access to any property like camera visibility or opacity or whatever that needs to be define in the “shape” or object. How can I do that if I start with a packed alembic.

I'm using arnold render in case that matters.

Thanks a lot!

You can use the path attribute in the alembic geometry loader to access components of your import, for most things you will need to unpack the geometry though

Andy is right, the best route is to parse the path attribute and you can group things, assign shaders to groups, add different subdivs based on name, adding cryptomattes…

I do it pretty much everything on 3 different VEX Wrangles so I group things, then attach new attributes to those groups and in the end I overwrite some old attribs as things are required.

I hope it helps

jb

Hi Jordi

DO you think you could post a simple hip file to what you are describing.

I am using the import alembic option and what to assign my arnold wood material to all my objects called “wood_geo”

I have started looking at style sheets to do this but what you are saying sounds much quicker.

Best

Mark