Howdy! I was trying to do some work today with attributes generated from the Houdini engine into maya. I know that attributes in Houdini will be expressed in the output shapes in Maya as extra attributes.

In my particular case, what I am trying to do is to pass attributes from a shape generated by the Houdini engine into another Houdini engine node, and noticed the following:

a- Plugging the array attributes that we store under extra attributes (I assume an array element per Houdini point/prim element) does not work so easily in Maya. As a result, does it make a sense to have an RFE to request that the Houdini engine import the extra attributes (only) of a shape node as detail attributes This will allow for some way to pass data in between mesh generated by the houdini engine, but also, allow for arbitrary passing of attributes from Maya meshes to the Houdini engine via the shape (without, say, having to add a ton of parameters so that we may have plugs)

b- I was very happy to realize that, if you pass primitive spheres with an attribute on them, these are represented as separate objects in Maya, with their primitive attributes expressed as regular float/int/string attributes! Would it be possible to have polysoups work the same way where each primitive generates a mesh and treat their primitive attributes as non-array when set on the maya shape?

I included an example HDA. Notice that when you pass the primitive spheres, they get split by primitive automatically, and their primitive attributes in Maya are treated as detail attributes. If you switch to the pig, notice that you have to split by group in order to get each primitive split, and their attributes come as array anyway

to add to this, I noticed that packed primitives behave the same way as the spheres, but primitive attributes are still passed as an array, which is not ideal

Went ahead and RFE'd these

81458, 81459

thank you!