Jonathan Mack

Did you try flatting it so that it's just one shape/transform in the alembic hierarchy? If you are exporting houdini packed primitives, they will automatically become separate shapes. The unpack sop can create a single mesh from all of the packed primitives. Then use the path attribute to control the desired partitioning and hierarchy. Exporting a single mesh to alembic will make the file much larger, but will be faster to render/process than an alembic with hundreds of thousands of shapes.

If the skin has well-defined uv coordinates, then yes, using the Bake Texture render node. I'm not sure how straight-forward it is to setup. It may require modifying shaders and the bake texture settings to export your groom-specific attributes to image planes.

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/out/baketexture.html [www.sidefx.com]

Use point attributes on the template points to control the transform applied to each copy:

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/copy/instanceattrs.html [www.sidefx.com]