sum][one
yeah I thought about that… although the Alembic I'm playing with has hundred of objects…
Ya tell me about it. Some of the assets we are passing around have thousands of objects which bog Houdini down to no end. There are tricks like flattening the hierarchy for static transforms, but then if you want to maintain a 1 to 1 with original source you can't do that.
A lot depends on if your data has to do a round trip or not. Our Alembic Archive node has like 7 different “import modes” on it depending on your task.
We have the original mode, a CHOP method which imports the xforms into chops, then the alembic objects read the xform data from CHOPs. This saves from having to look up xforms in the .abc file. We also have a Alembic Xform's SOP which builds a point cloud of all the objects xforms, handy for instancing. etc etc.
We are currently in our first big production with Alembic, and so far its been pretty awesome.