I have been working on the cloth sims for a project I'm working on and I've been able to do them pretty successfully by taking alembic exports from Maya and converting them to Houdini geometry all within a “Geometry” node by tabbing in a “Convert” node. The pipeline for this film is set up so that all of the alembics from Maya are automatically loaded into “Geometry Template” nodes. I can't figure out how to get a “Geometry Template” node to become a deforming collider for my cloth object. For example, Houdini won't let me select the character's legs as a deforming collider for the skirt or it says “The attempted operation failed. Object or Geometry node must be current.”

I have been struggling with this for over a week and have been spinning my tires. I haven't found any tutorials or videos that address this issue yet either. Is there any way to convert from “Geometry Template” to “Geometry” or a way to get an alembic in a Geometry Template to interact with a cloth object? How can I best approach this issue?