I know this is a pretty noob question but how do you export your groom in houdini in a software like maya? what are the nodes that I can use?

I've used alembic to export the full res animated hair gen for rendering purposes, but I suppose you could export guides this way as well. I'm not sure what use they'll be in maya though.

You can render the guides with Arnold and vray. Both engines will render the curve as geometry. I don't use Arnold much but I hear it's very good for this sort of thing.

In Houdini if you add an attribute to control colour down the curve and another for width you can take advantage of this in both render engines plugging that attribute name into the shader.

The same trick works for particles (points) too I believe

With our workflow, we initially export the curves out of maya with the proper names for each section of the hair(descriptions). Then we bring them into Houdini, attach them, sim them, then export the curves out as an abc. Then, back in maya, we use those curves to instance hair onto each one using xgen.

Midasssilver
With our workflow, we initially export the curves out of maya with the proper names for each section of the hair(descriptions). Then we bring them into Houdini, attach them, sim them, then export the curves out as an abc. Then, back in maya, we use those curves to instance hair onto each one using xgen.

Should I create the basic curves or full grooming in Houdini before exporting it in Maya Xgen for render?