I have a rigged mechanical model in Blender that I'm trying to import into Houdini. I've managed to get it into my scene in a few ways, but cannot find a way to get everything I need all at once.

Currently the main issue I'm trying to solve is that the normals look soft and rounded when I import using any kind of reference. However when I import it in a SOP Create using the USD character importer, the normals are perfect.

If I import using Asset Reference, I can get my materials and animation applied easily, and with some effort was able to generate a proxy mesh as well. If I run the model through a sopmodify to edit it, most of the time it doesn't apply any changes and while I do have it working, I'm really not sure why that one works when others haven't.
If I use SOPcreate, I can get the good normals I want, but the materials and skeleton don't come in.

I can go into detail on what I've tried, but it's not a short list.\
I'm probably just not using things the way they're meant to be, so some more experienced eyes would be greatly appreciated.