I imported a liquid simulation made in Realflow into Houdini. Worked fine. Then I meshed the particles using a VDBfluidparticler, which also worked like a delight.

I want to export all that using a ROP Alembic Output node. That works, but never for the full frame range, although the ABC Output node doesn't throw an error. It runs until the very last frame, but there is no mesh.

I then create another ABC file for the rest (until that fails and I need to create still another one…).

The ABC files this creates are getting huge >8GB. The problem is all the lighting and rendering is supposed to be done in Maya, so I have to get this stuff out of Houdini.

- What might be the reason for that and how can I debug that? I cannot find any log for the ABC export.

- Could it be useful to first bake all the meshes into a bgeo file before exporting them? I didn't do so as it felt like an unnecessary step as ABC should be well enough.

P.S.: The simulation done in Realflow is fine as it is, no need to redo it in Houdini, but the mesher in RF2013 doesn't seem to give the same convincing results as the one in Houdini.