Kym watts

A Houdini engine license is required on your license server. It's not always consumed, but seems to be a requirement that it exists.

Some thoughts to add to this thread, in case it helps .

If you don't mind bringing the alembic in via a sop context like a sop create, you can specify on the alembic sop to keep transform/shape hierarchy.

AD products are notorious for saving attributes out side of the abc spec locations.
We found that using the python module _alembic_hom_extensions that comes with houdini we could get these attributes and put them in the correct locations.

If you have some ownership or control of what is getting exported, ie a pipeline of sorts. On the exporter,, they usually have a way to promote attributes from your mesh to the top alembic primitive. I would highly recommend writing any of these attributes to json and reading them back in on the hou side.


Hope this helps.

If you want to do this in python, start with the example here on the usd survival guide.

https://lucascheller.github.io/VFX-UsdSurvivalGuide/dcc/houdini/fx/frustumCulling.html [lucascheller.github.io]

Its nice because it shows how to get the frustum, and just does bounding box intersections against it.

Its not too hard then to change it to target prim kinds like components. Etc.

I recommend using the average method, this way the python code will give you the prims in frustum for the whole camera move.


The whole usd survival guide is a great entry point to openusd python.




Hope this helps.