Hezza

It'll be a big investment in time to get back to producing work to the level you are currently in Max but once you're there you won't be limited by plugins (or autodesk). As you grow as an artist you'll have room to expand into Houdini.

I've been using Houdini for nearly 3 years now and I'd say it took me a year to really ‘get’ it, and then every few months I have another big revelation about how everything is connected and how data is moved around. This is after using Maya for 14 years, I now dread having to load it up.

You can get a long way without learning vector math but it will definitely help down the road. As someone else said about, check out http://www.entagma.com/ [www.entagma.com] for some cool procedural tutorials, though they're definitely on the technical end of things.

The tutorials section of sidefx is great too.
https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/ [www.sidefx.com]

Don't worry, you have to list the attributes in the alembic export window but I was naming them wrong. They also seem to go into the detailed field in houdini instead of the primitive list like above, but reckon I can figure it out now

Bumping this old thread in the hope that someone sees it.

I'm having trouble getting Maya to export PP attributes, P, V and ID are there in Houdini but nothing else. (They're not there as primitive attrbs that I can promote yet)

So I think I'm missing something on the Maya side, but there's not really any options on the Alembic export. I'm trying to bring across some of the firework's examples that are in the Content Browser for a quick turn around job.

Cheers

Martin