I tried to export a simple vertex-coloured box from Houdini to Meshlab in a Stanford Triangle Format (.ply), but MeshLab didn't accept the file. Instead it told me that there are some problems with a “Bad verted index in face”.
Has anyone tried passing this kind of a file from Houdini to MeshLab and knows a workaround for this problem?

I have seen some .ply anomalies when I exported from Houdini and imported into Blender. In my case it was a simple font. The Houdini .ply exporter made the font look all messed up in Blender.

Will Meshlab import another format like .OBJ?

When I tried .OBJ into Blender, from Houdini, everything looked ok.

As far as I know, Wavefront format does not support vertex attributes (though I might be mistaken).
Can someone recommend a format supported by Houdini that would import to MeshLab with extra vertex/point attributes - not limited to colour? I'm thinking some extras like a bunch of floats and vectors.

alembic is the other one that comes to mind.. does meshlab support it?