Hi all.
I did spend some time trying to find the fastest and easiest way how to shade large assets in alembic cache.
My task was to be able to shade based on names, based on viewport selection and based on hierarchy. This is very easily done in softimage, where you can put geometry inside the group and apply shader on the group.

I did try this several approache:
1 using alembic archive, divide geo into bundles (works with viewport selection, name wildcards and hierarchy selection) and then apply shaders onto bundles. Unfortunately bundles are local to the scene file and cant be transfered to different scene

The second most usable workflow consist of creating groups in houdini and assigning shaders to groups. And thats where the problem is (H14 and H15).

I do have alembic SOP, with delayed load and primitive groups turned on. If i do select primitive group in viewport and then create group, the primitive group number is added to Pattern. It works fine but its not related to the group name (and it will break once someone else add new geo to the asset cache). If i enable Select groups in viewport and then create group the group name is used instead of the group number, but in this case it doesn't work and the group doesnt contain the selection. Not mentioning that using alembic SOP on very large assets its extremely slow.

Can someone help me with that or even bug report the group pattern not working with group name?

BTW i did spend some time to try grouping based on the expression and point attribute (path). Works fine for BGEO, doesnt work for alembic.