Maya Alembic Import issue : normal vector scope does not match size of data

Tools Maya
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Hello ! I’m looking for some help in Maya

When importing an alembic from 3ds Max (tyFlow) into Maya, warnings shown in Maya :
// Warning: Color sample size is: 184 expecting: 45 or 180
// Warning: normal vector scope does not match size of data, skipping normals

I re-imported the same Alembic file in 3ds Max, Houdini, and Blender and it worked fine for all of them. So my question is : what causes this issue ? What should I technically do to make it compatible with Maya ?

Using 3ds Max and Maya 2026

You can see get the alembic file here :

Thanks in advance for your help!

2

I unfortunately don’t have time to dig into this one.
But I can drop A quick script to print the hierarchy of an alembic file and its properties.Sorry, no nice command line interface. You've gotta edit it yourself · GitHub

It prints out things like this:

Archive: D:\test\path.abc HDF5
 ╚ Face IXform ([0, -1], 1.0)
    ║  └ .xform
    ║     └ .userProperties
    ║        └ simplex
    ╚ Face IPolyMesh ([0, 275], 1.0)
       └ .geom
          ├ .selfBnds
          ├ .faceIndices
          ├ uv
          │  ├ .vals
          │  └ .indices
          ├ P
          >  <imath.V3fArray object at 0x00000204DE16BB20>
          └ .faceCounts

Double bars are the object hierarchy, Single bars are the property hierarchy

To use it, just go down into the main() function and change the arguments to printObjects(). Make sure to read the docstring to printObjects.

This is a personal script, and I used to hack on this all the time to debug alembic files before we moved to USD. It’s meant to mess with and change to suit your current needs. If you need to change it, don’t worry too much about the mechanics of the recursive prefixing/indenting. I found that part on StackOverflow somewhere and I barely understand it :face_with_tongue:

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