Hi,

I ran across an “interesting” problem whilst exporting a fractured geo from Houdini to Maya as an alembic.

When I fracture the geo into 150 pieces, the alembic takes 11 seconds to load into Maya.
However when I fracture it into 675 pieces, the alembic takes 3 minutes to load into Maya.
If I fracture it into a very high number, Maya just hangs when I try to load the alembic.

Is this a Maya or Houdini issue??

I'm exporting with the build Hierarchy checked and packed transform set to transform geometry, which gives me separate objects with transforms in Maya.

It looks like setting Face sets to “No Face Sets” in the alembic rop may help this but I'm still working on this, and I don't even know what a face set is…

I've attached the alembic files if anybody wants to check them out!

Eric

Hi I opened files in Houdini Apprentice 17.5.153 and I had no problem with loading files and their rendering. I'm using Linux mint 19.1. I'm not Maya user.

It sounds like you are encountering a performance bug in Maya's Alembic importer. “Face set” is basically the Alembic term for a “group”. Your geometry contains primitive groups called “glass_concentricoutside”, “glass_radialinside”, “glass_radialoutside”, “inside”, and “outside” (these become face sets in the Alembic archive). The “abcecho” command line tool can help you determine what is actually stored in an Alembic archive.

derrick
It sounds like you are encountering a performance bug in Maya's Alembic importer. “Face set” is basically the Alembic term for a “group”. Your geometry contains primitive groups called “glass_concentricoutside”, “glass_radialinside”, “glass_radialoutside”, “inside”, and “outside” (these become face sets in the Alembic archive). The “abcecho” command line tool can help you determine what is actually stored in an Alembic archive.

Thanks! That abcecho tool looks helpful. Maya claims they are aware of the bug and it's possible that Maya 2019 has fixed it….

Face sets are not the problem. Though Maya's Alembic tools are so shit, the programmers at Autodesk should be ashamed.
The real problem is that you are building the hierarchy. There is absolutely no need to be building it. You want this
coming into Maya as one transform. If you need to use Maya, there's really only one sensible tool to use for Alembic
importing. This tool has very similar controls and performance as Houdini Alembic.

multi-verse [www.multi-verse.io]




Cheers

Lewis