northupfox

I am wondering if anyone has had any luck getting this to work.
I am trying to do some packed RBD magic with objects and take some control over the center of mass. I have attached an example scene in which the pivot of the packed objects is clearly established before it goes into DOPs. However once in DOPs this pivot get switched to the calculated centroid as soon as the sim starts.

I have tried disabling the “Compute Center Of Mass” option, and I get the same results whether I create the RBD packed object manually or with the shelf button (which adds that crazy expression in the Pivot channels). I even tried adding a pivot attribute in SOPs. Nothing works at sim time.

Would be great to get any thoughts about getting this to work.
FYI: We are working in 14.0.361
Thanks so much for your help!
~Ben

Yeah, I don't know why this is so poorly documented on the Maya side. Its an amazing feature for Alembic. Spread the word!

***EDIT*** I was writing this while you were replying…glad you got it.
This is one of the secret gems of Alembic that is woefully under documented.
Any vertex vector attribute on your geometry thats listed by Houdini as name.r,name.b,name.g on Alembic export can import and connect directly in Maya by simply adding -rcs to your import string.
The color set will be named the same as the attribute name in Houdini.
Unfortunately the Maya Alembic Import GUI doesn't have this option, but the script is super easy.
AbcImport -rcs “/path/to/myColorFile.abc”
Vector attributes listed as name.x,name.y,name.z OR name.0,name.1,name.2 will not work, so you need to double check the type on creation and editing.

The workflow suggested by Joker386 is the way to go for other arbitrary attributes, but fortunately multiple color attributes can be used to store most data that you may need.
Hopefully that helps.