Hey there.

I am curious about something here which I have not had the time to test ( and no access to Houdini engine at the moment )

Has anyone got vertex colours to work from Houdini to Maya in terms of colouring the geometry for render time?

Is it a straight forward process? or will it require some heavy lifting?

How about using the packing tools. does that work?

I will ask more later but basically I was thinking of creating some L-systems in houdini and scattering them around in maya and have them render using whatever vertex colours I setup in Houdini. Obviously packing would help with performance.

cheers.

Yes , Houdini Engine can export vertex color(actually point color in Houdini) to the Maya , you can check these data in the Component Editor window in the Maya , But unfortunately I don't know why Maya can't show these colors in the viewport by default , I found a little trick for showing them in the viewport :
Import your model with some point color in the Maya with Houdini Engine , Then select just 1 vertex and change it's color in the component editor manually , now you should have correct vertex color in the viewport !
(Maybe this is a BUG , I check it with Maya2014 on windows)

Also about rendering vertex color in the Maya , I know we can do that with MentalRayVertexColor node :idea: