Alembic from maya - reversed normals

[kumpa]

Hi,

I got some maya scenes I exported alembic caches from and it all went reasonably well until I had to make a pass with mantra cartoon shader ( the rest of passes are rendered with redshift) when I noticed normals on some objects are flipped, most of them in a manner typical to that of objects being mirrored during modeling with transformations frozen without normals being flipped. Going back to maya I also noticed that according to maya all the normals are pointing in right direction. Any thoughts on how to address that issue ? Maya being the mess it is and me not touching it for 10 years except as glorified file converter I can't seem to be able to debug the situation. Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers

[MitchFields]

When exporting alembic files you have some options for what you want to keep/get rid of if you scroll down. Did you already mess with this? 

Edited April 8, 2019 by MitchFields

[kumpa]

Hi,

I did, I had to enable write uv sets and uv write (not sure which one exactly made uvs appear in houdini) and when I noticed normals problem I tired no normals and that didn't work. No other option looksa like it has anything to do with normals but i'll keep trying nevertheless.

The whole maya alembic - houdini workflow seems to be incredible convoluted, to my absolute astonishment I discovered that material assignments are not included in alembic file, so I had to export static fbx file, edit mental 10m long name attributes maya generates on both files until they matched and loop through all the objects to transfer names of materials from fbx to alembic.