[MAYA] Arnold is not loading properly on simple exports of objects, please help

Turbopasta

I have a simple problem, but I'm not sure why this is happening. I'm running Maya 2017 I have a simple mesh with an aiStandardSurface applied to it with color, specular, and bump maps. It looks good in the Arnold Renderview. If I select it, and export it as a .OBJ, it will generate a .mtl of the same name next to it, and when I bring it in, it's the same mesh except it's completely black in the viewport and the Arnold Renderview. If I look at the attributes of the texture, it's turned into a lambert named "aiStandardSurface4SG1", which isn't the custom name I gave it before the export. Converting it to Ai Standard from here doesn't do anything to bring it back. I should also note I am opening these on the same computer that built them from the same file directory, the textures are in a folder labeled "textures" that's one level up. 

If I could get any help on this that would be great, I need to figure this out quickly, thanks.

throttlekitty

obj/mtl is a super basic format and doesn't handle any kind of advanced shaders, even Arnolds standard surface. It also uses the shading group node, not the material for naming, but that's a minor point here.

If you're trying to move objects from one Maya scene to another, there are much better options- namely copy and paste, or importing a scene file.

Turbopasta

Yeah, I sort of thought that was the case, thanks. What's the best way to sort of package the whole thing together for someone else if it's running something like an arnold shader? maya ASCII or something?