Maya to Solaris workflow

[RudyardKipling]

Hello party people,

I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate Houdini Solaris in my workflow. The way I do it now for something like a car is I use Maya for Model/shading -> Rig -> Anim -> Light/render OR just anim/light/render. If it's something that doesn't need to be animated it's just Model/shading -> Light/render.

The reason I'm looking at Solaris is that the multi-shot workflow seems way better than having a separate Maya file for each shot, especially for sequences that has very similar lighting, sort of a built in Katana. The issue is that I'm not sure how to get the animated models into Solaris together with the shaders. Arnolds USD export works great, and the import works in SOPs, but using a sopimport in LOPs doesn't bring in the shading. Another way would be to do the shading in Houdini and export alembics from anim and have shader assignment in the top of the LOPs tree, but I'm not sure about the ins and outs of that. 

So you see I'm fumbling a bit in the dark right now, what I know is that I'd like to continue using Maya for modeling and animation. Any help, tips, pointers and input is greatly appreciated.

[haggi]

You can use a multishot workflow in Maya as well with RenderSetup. It's not as flexible as in Solaris, but it should work. But for Solaris, if you export an Arnold USD, did you try to load it directly into Solaris without first loading in sops?