Writing out Alembic as ASS in Maya 2017

[robster4100]

I have exported an alembic file from Houdini. The alembic file works fine inside Maya, the issue is that alembic files are really unstable in Maya, with heavy geometry coming from Houdini, crashes occur often. As a way around this I am trying to save the alembic files out as ASS files so they are not loaded inside Maya directly and instead are only loaded by Arnold at render time.

An issue is occurring when writing out the ASS files, only the frame currently in the viewport is being written out for each frame in the sequence.

Alembic Ogawa: https://goo.gl/acwJoH

Alembic HDF5: https://goo.gl/Q63Gx4

Export settings https://imgur.com/a/ZKvSl

Maya 2017 Updata 4

MtoA 1.4.2.3

Arnold 4.2.16.4

Win 10 64bit

[gshankar165]

its working

[Shawn_Kearney1]

Will this export geometry to the .ass, or reference the .abc and draw it via MtoA?

[gshankar165]

This exports the alembic data to. ass file.

[robster4100]

When I write out as an .ASS I get a file sequence, the problem is that every frame in that sequence is written out as the same frame. So the problem is that the .ASS files being written out are all using the same frame (which happens to be what ever frame is loaded in the view-port at the time). I can''t tell from looking at the .ass file but I'm assume it's trying to write out the geometry rather than referencing the Alembic file.

[gshankar165]

I exported sequence. Its working. Its not overwriting the same frame over and over again. I can play the whole ass standin node in view port.

Still if u have issue, tell me, i ll send u screenvideo.

[robster4100]

I've just tested this method, for some reason I'm still getting the same issue. are you in a different version of Arnold or Maya? maybe I'm missing something really obvious but I've done (from what I can tell), exactly what you've done in your screen shots.

ass-filesequence.png

[gshankar165]

Its Maya 2017 and Arnold 2.0.1.

In my studios also we follow the same method with diff diff version of maya and arnold, Its never overwrite the same frame.

Reinstalling everything may fix the issue or try the same method on any other system.