Mesh naming - Houdini to Maya

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I've found if I create a group for primitives in Houdini, it comes across to Maya with a group named the same name with an underscore then another number (what appears to be the group number), then “mesh” underneath that.

Is there any more control to not create groups in Maya but simply name the mesh the name of the Houdini group?

I guess it is technically doing a one to one conversion, a group in Houdini comes over as a group in Maya, but can I name just the primitives and not have groups?

Perhaps grouping primitives in Houdini isn't the only way to get names to come across to Maya via Houdini Engine?
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Unfortunately, the “_0” is an implementation detail of Houdini that got exposed in Houdini Engine. Mapping Houdini group to Maya group is not one-to-one.



For example, in a simple network where there are two Group SOPs that creates the same group, the output from Houdini Engine will become “foo_0” and “foo_1”. Unfortunately, it's not easy for artists to predict/control when this happens. Ideally, we should consolidate them so that one Houdini group does map to one Maya group. Let me find out if we can do anything about this.

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Andrew / アンドリュー
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Hello, I am encountering a similar issue for Houdini 16 Engine in Maya 2018. The meshes are getting appended with a “_1”, “_2”, “_3”, etc. Is there any way to tell the Engine or Asset to not append these numbers to the mesh name?

Thanks!
-Ben
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What primitives is the asset outputting? And are you using “Split Geos By Group”?

When “Split Geos By Group” is off, and the asset only outputs polygons, all the polygons should be outputted to the same “_0” Maya node, and shouldn't be outputting “_1” and “_2” mesh nodes.
Andrew / アンドリュー
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Hi Andrew,
I am using “Split Geos By Group”, but even if I wasn't, the inclusion of the additional “_0” to the mesh names are proving to greatly limit the usefulness of the Houdini Engine in our pipeline. I really just need the names to either match what they are in Houdini, or be explicitly set.

Since the last post on this thread was from 2015, I was just checking to see if any progress had been made on this issue.
Edited by Ben Guastella - Nov. 13, 2017 21:56:48
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Hi, I am also interested in finding a way to generate correctly named procedural assets in Maya using Houdini. Setting a group name in Houdini and allowing Houdini Engine to “Split Geos by Group” seemed the perfect way to name the assets, but now I have also hit this problem where a number is appended to the end of the group name, even if all group names are different.

I too am wondering if any progress has been made to allow easy naming of meshes in Maya using Houdini?
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