Casey Benn

Ok, I finally was able to get this to work and thought I would leave it here since I didn't get any responses.. in case the other four people on Earth that will work this way some day may look for it.

I am not exactly sure why it works but I fiddled around with different ideas about attaching information to the data before it ended up in the Cache.

Previously I was doing the (Convert) node from "All to Polygon Soup" after the Sim Cache.

I also was just using the default Outside/Inside/Chipping etc groups that the RBD Material Fracture creates.
Instead this time I applied materials Outside and Inside using those predefined groups to see if they would help Maya see information about the faces assigned after the UV process.

Somehow this ends up with a successful Alembic bake that doesn't crash Maya on import AND... with UVs.

Here is the info on the convert node... I see the UV 3flt.. isn't that my UV info?

I finally arrived at the magical numbers that stopped most of the weird issues above.

Now I am at the export stage and can't seem to get an Alembic written that has the UVs still intact.

I can see that my previous experiment with plugging the UVAutoSeams and UVFlatten did work as I can see the data post the FileCache node but I couldn't make it write an Alembic that wouldn't freeze Maya on import at first.

I tried using the convert node and it did make it so that the Alembic import in Maya worked right away, takes longer to convert but works.

BUT.. the alembic, while it animates fairly well (meaning refresh time scrubbing the time line) for such a large data set it does not have the UV info intact.

It seems the convert node may be getting usable polygon info but it does something to the UV information..

In Maya it shows up as a bunch of nested groups in the UV window but I can't find any UV info.