Hello, I am running into a problem maintaining per instance hierarchy while sending fbx from Maya to Houdini and back.

As you can see from the file, I am importing a fbx from Maya that contains multiple meshes at different hierarchy levels. I then would like to use Houdini tools to distribute this object to multiple points and send that back to Maya.

Problem is, when importing back into Maya, all meshes with the same name / path get merged into a single entity.

So I guess I somehow have to give each instance in Houdini its unique name / and / or recreate a unique path attribute, which I failed at until now. Any help much appreciated. Thanks.

The easiest way to keep a 1 to 1 hierarchy between Maya and Houdini is doing it through USD nowadays - is pretty straightforward.
Then in Maya, you just convert to Maya meshes if you do not want to deal with USD but you have all the hierarchy in place.

So instead of using FBX, you will export as USD to Houdini from Maya with the same hierarchy, then in LOPS you do the instance, and you have multiple choices on what method to use in the instancer for export this will depend on what you get back from the instances, then use ROP USD to export it back to Maya.

Then in Maya, you load USD into the stage and right-click on the prim/prims that you want to convert back to Maya meshes, done.

Btw - You can always do the same in Maya, do the point instancer, or just instances, etc there, so it really depends on what you need to get from Houdini.