Ok, I’ve gone through all the forum posts, and with some effort, I see people have succeeded in bringing in vertex color sets through alembic, primarily from Houdini.
Now I’m not needing to do that, I’m simply stripping a heavy dynamic scene down to a mesh, and then feeding that later in the pipeline, so I’m exporting and importing alembic caches entirely from within Maya.
I found the -wcs and -rcs flags to write out and read in the color sets, so I’m doing my export and imports through the command line editor.
I can see a 3x bump in file size when I do a alembic write out, so I’m pretty sure vertex color data is exported successfully. I am having no luck importing the SOB though, the file comes in fine, but no color set.
I’m at the end of my rope, I can’t for the life of me figure out what could be wrong. Currently in 2014, if anyone has any insights, I would love to hear em.