Hello

The workflow will allow asset build artists to tag the geo with material-names so that lookdev artists will be able to hook them up.

I am trying to understand how to pre-assing objects to collections in Maya (or post Maya), export them to alembics and usd file formats, and then read correctly in Solaris. The maya plugins for alembic and usd seem quite limited, there is no specific options for collections/object-sets in the export command.

Is there any work around to this? or a better workflow in the Solaris/USD philosophy?

I am curious to know if I can use primvars in Solaris to filter object to assign shaders in alternative to collections?

Cheers
R.

Solaris has a pretty rich primitive pattern-matching syntax that you can use to find primitives using any number of different rules. You can either use this to build USD collections, or just directly use these primitive patterns in LOP nodes to do your material assignments. See https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/pattern.html [www.sidefx.com]