I have an alembic archive, each geo node within it is being shaded with a mantra surface shader, but on all of the geo nodes I've added an override to change the maps…
but this is not being recognized at all.
what is the expected behavior here?

Did you applied materials and override inside archive? I mean on actual Houdini geo or alembic (which is pack fragmented).

If are applying inside alembic archive. Then load it as Houdini geo then apply materials and overrides then pack it again.
Or simply use packedit sop.

the alembic is loaded as Houdini Geometry
the override is on the geo node

alembic_archive
—alembic_transform
——houdini_geo_node —> override is here
———alembic_SOP

I've also tried:

alembic_archive
—alembic_transform
——houdini_geo_node
———alembic_SOP
——— |
———material_SOPoverride is here

packed or unpacked makes no difference.

Can you post simple .hip?

I built a simple hip file…and it worked just fine… :shock:
it may be this terrible asset….I'll have to test a few more…

thanks