Houdini to Maya : Assign materials back on fractured model exported as alembic

[olivier.colchen]

Hey,

Basically we have people working on the shading of a model in Maya while I'm using the base, pre-shading mesh to do some fracture and simulation FX in Houdini. Parallel tasks, woo !

My work will then be loaded back into Maya for lighting and rendering. I'm planning on using Alembic for that.

Question is : how can we effortlessly slap the shading back on my FX'ed model?
The path attribute / maya hierarchy and names will stay consistent throughout the process.
I had hoped exporting shader assignment in one ass and shaders in another would do the trick, but shader assignment still requires the shapes to be exported as well.

I feel like there should be an override somewhere that I'm missing... Both on Maya and Houdini. Or a way to turn shader assignments into operators or something ?

[Stephen.Blair]

IYou can't use an operator on the alembic procedural (to re-apply the shading)?

Or export shop_material when you export the alembic from Maya?

Is it one mesh in Maya, but many primitives coming back from Houdini?

[olivier.colchen]

I would like to use operators, actually, but I'm not sure how to generate them from Maya when the shading was done the classic way ( assigning shaders directly to each meshes ). It this "exportable" as operator graphs ? It would be perfect, really. Heck, if I could motivate them into creating collections at least. The most elegant and arnold-like solution, imho.

I thought of Shop_material too, but I'm using the mesh from the model department, meaning the shader assignment isn't completely done yet - though at this point in time I think we have a clear idea of what shader will go on what surface. Not sure here again how to add shop_mat to the mesh I'm given but that can be found I guess ( I'm a houdini user, I barely know how to translate things in Maya 😉 ).
Main argument in favor of this is that it would be pretty automatic at least.

Multiple mesh in maya, many prim in Houdini. It should translate back into Maya into at least the same number of shapes with the same distinct hierarchy, ie house/front_door/door_knob/door_knobShap