How could the sand effect created in Houdini match the lighting in Maya?

[Penelope]

Hi everyone, we meet a problem here. Our group are using Houdini to do the sand interaction effects, but we do the lighting in Maya. How could we do the transfer? For now, we just do the lighting in Houdini to try to match the lighting which we did in Maya. We use the Maya engine to import the sand particles from Houdini, but it occupied a lot of virtual memory.  Is there anyone could help us ? We hope to find out how to solve this problem. Thanks a lot!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Looking forward to any suggestions!!!!!! 

[Feather]

I imagine my answer is not ideal but the only instance I've seen that enables lighting output from Maya and Houdini to match is using Arnold. 

Scene descriptions from Arnold produce exactly the same result as they use the same lights and materials. This means your Houdini scenes only use Arnold lights, Arnold materials etc and similarly your maya scenes only use Arnold lights and materials. 

Without Arnold you're stuck kind of guessing and trying to match by eye or making up for it in comp later. 

When this is done properly, lighting setups can be passed back and forth between the two packages so long as the scene scales match.