or if you are using renderer with alembic procedural like Vray or Arnold then they should render your points just fine as it would bypass Maya altogether
otherwise you need to do some nasty tricks, like connecting your points into one messy polygon, just so that it loads to Maya or use different way to load them, being different alembic plugin, or Houdini Engine, or export in a different format
Either use a vray proxy to import particles into Maya, you can use Houdini Engine as well, or you can copy little spheres onto the particles and export them as geometry that way (but then you have less rendering options in Maya).
They might provide updates for 2018 and 2019 but nothing planned for now. Until then you could try to get an updated compiled version of alembic for your distribution.
We didn't have feedback from houdini users and it would be much welcome
I've had the best luck importing Houdini particles via alembic into Maya into a VrayProxy, point attrs like Cd come in by default no need to run funky MEL scripts to access them
If you use Arnold, or 3Delight you can use this plugin. It is a serious tool, not a toy, and gives Maya users Houdini style delayed-load, bounding box, full geo streamed to the graphics card, Alembic layering, and houdini packed instances saved as alembic work fine too. All point attributes are easily accessed without any bullshit work arounds.
Maya does support importing point clouds from Alembic, but unfortunately there is a bug where it only works if the point cloud follows Maya's naming conventions, i.e. the point cloud needs to be at /particle1/particleShape1 in the Alembic archive (/particle1 needs to be an Alembic IXform and /particle1/particleShape1 needs to be an IPoints).
That said, Maya does not currently (as of Maya 2022) support animated point clouds or curves in Alembic. The workaround is to use the Bifrost plugin that ships with Maya.
That's not true, I did use read_alembic, and it need to be set up specially for maya, if not it won't load. Once you've managed to load the alembic and its points, it will be useless because Vray and Redshift won't render the instances, only arnold does it. So, don't bother and don't waste time, use Blender (free and open source)and it will deal with the points and instances as usual.
juancarlosgzrz That's not true, I did use read_alembic, and it need to be set up specially for maya, if not it won't load. Once you've managed to load the alembic and its points, it will be useless because Vray and Redshift won't render the instances, only Arnold does it. So, don't bother and don't waste time, use Blender (free and open source)and it will deal with the points and instances as usual.
That has nothing to do with BF, the render engines need to support it. And Actually, you can use Vray inside BF through USD nowadays.