Hey there,

We're trying to find a good workflow for importing Alembic caches of e.g. animated characters from a Maya animation scene:

a) The “Alembic Archive” node creates a single or several nested subnetworks from the transforms found in an archive. If objects were added or renamed in a new version of the Alembic archive, this network will have to be updated/rebuilt. If we had created nodes inside the network to modify contents or assign materials, these will be deleted. To avoid this, we'd have to build a separate geometry SOP and object-merge the archive contents there.

b) Another option is using just one “Alembic” node inside a Geometry SOP and selecting “Name Group Using Transform Node Name”. This allows assigning materials to groups via “Material” nodes. If some of the archive contents changed in the future, this won't break anything.
We could still apply the object-merge workflow in order to create groups of objects contained in the archive, e.g. a helmet or weapon. It also feels more network-IO-friendly as there's only one instead of many nodes accessing the file system.

How are you guys doing it, are there even more ways?

Thanks,
Michael

I have been using “a” recently, the first tickbox (I dont have houdini in front of me) can be useful, avoiding subnetworks.

Objects changing name could always be a potential issue I suppose, wildcards are useful though!

I'm probably not being helpful, but I'm just also interested in the subject.

Alembic archive with scripts that maintain links/updates between alembic archive and separate geo container with object merges (duplicating hierarchy inside alembic archive)

We do use alembic node with selection sets created in Maya (houdini is not best tool for selections in viewport) as group names, then using split node to divide it into hierarchy for shading purposes and user friendliness. On simple assets (less then 5materials) we use one material node with multiple tabs for materials (assigned based on group names, that came from Maya)