This is happening for me on all meshes. Make a cube in maya, load it into a houdini asset and all normals are blown away (replaced by a generic smooth normal). When I open the houdini scene and check the input mesh there is indeed no normal attribute on the verts. Uvs, color, material and such are making it through fine, but no normals.

I'm using Maya 2016 (tried with 2013 and get the same issue) and Houdini 14.0.396.

I've attached the simplest example possible. It just passes the mesh through… but destroys the normals.

Ah, oops. This used to work before, and it got broken in 14.0.372. I've made a fix, and it should be in tomorrow's build (14.0.409). Thanks for reporting!

Awesome, thank you sir.