+1
Right now going the moi3d-route.

Maybe the labs team could be the right people to ask for importers and organisation tools for cad files.

Some kind of Cad importer sounds nice, but Houdini doesn't even play nice with basic FBX files currently. One has to jump through a lot of hoops to export FBX files properly.

Does anyone know if there's any improvement in that department in 19 ?

yes, reading a CAD/step file in houdini is necessary

Now that Epic has a financial stake in Sidefx, Datasmith would be a good option for Houdini.
It can convert a lot of CAD formats.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/datasmith [www.unrealengine.com]

In the meantime you can use Unreal Engine with Datasmith for the conversion ....

I'm coming from 3ds max and that is what I'm using to convert my step files to fbx but my target is totally replace 3ds max.
Things like not having a proper CAD importer are what make me being stuck between max and Houdini.

We need this, SideFX.

+1

I will escalate this to have more Surfaces operations possible in Houdini which will perfectly make sense in a procedural context. Trim, join, fillet... As we are living at a time where the big buy the small, maybe Sidefx could pass an agreement with MOI software developer. A brilliant little piece of software which the best cad converter too actually

Yes, MOI. Use it all the time to convert step files.

+1 for a CAD import. Ideally one which would allow to access the hierarchy and attributes before tessellating so we could set up rules based on names, materials and bounding boxes for individual LOD's... And then of course importing everything as packed/instanced Geo...

I also looked into Unreal/Datasmith to replace 3dsmax which works quite okay.
The biggest downside with fbx import is that we lose the instancing. A workaround for that is USD which UE can do via plugin. But as far as I can tell, it's necessary to wrangle the metadata from LOP to SOP in order to get the correct referenced USD assets - in case you want to reestablish some kind of instancing on SOP level for further optimization (it seems like Houdini does an internal enumeration which screw's up the naming of the USD prims (meaning the path and name attribute is useless, especially when the source CAD objects end with a digit...)... - here is some more on how to do that: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/82054/?page=1#post-353069 [www.sidefx.com]

A +100 from me.
I'm a new user, working mainly in product visualisation and being able to import common CAD data formats such as STEP is central to a lot of stuff that I do.

Ironic that a Canadian software company supports USD over CAD

Same here ! +1000
Put me on the waiting list for a proper way to import CAD objects