Not sure what to make of this. Created a Principled shader and simply used a texture in the base color.

As you can see it renders all black with Uv wireframe. Actual Texture to the Right

This is an Alembic import. Using an Nvidia 920M graphics card.

One thing to remember about the principled shader is that the diffuse color is a multiplier for the map. So to get the full color from the map you have to set the diffuse color to white, or (1,1,1).

True, but the default is a light grey which will get you in the ballpark.

But I figured out what the source of the problem is anyway. It is the UVs. A problem with my Alembic import/export.

EDIT:

OK so the solution is as follows.

I had a character with multiple objects. It seems if you export one Alembic object from Maya you can use the defaults. And the UV caries over.

But if you select multiple objects for the export, you have to go into the Pipeline Cache/Alembic Cache/Export Selection to Alembic, go to the Advanced Options and choose “Write UVs”.

As a note, with this export option from Maya there is a bug that creates a crash if you try to use the Alembic Delayed Load Primities option. It seems to only work to use Create Houdini Geometry. Maybe there is some reason for this.

But anyway. With this method the UVs come over correctly and the colors of course are rendered properly.