Hi there!
I was wondering if it is possible to create some kind of “nested” assets.

what i want to achieve:

to explain, lets say i want to create a warehouse for instance.

i have an asset called “shelf” with procedural parameters for measures and what products to put in.

i also have an asset, which distributes shelf-assets in my scene… with copy stamping its no problem
to randomize measures, products etc.

But what i want is the ability for the user to click on one of the shelfs (after distribution) and still having access to the custom parameters i created for this asset.

Is it possible? how would you do that?

thx for your thoughts.

The recipe for creating the geometry is done by the HDA itself and you end up with geometry. If you select the final geometry after the HDA SOPs have done their work, you are picking the result of the HDA. You need to re-apply the construction rules by adding another HDA SOP set up to modify input final bookshelf again to make changes if you want to do it your way.

The whole idea of select current SOP versus Display SOP reinforces the opposite workflow: Affect attributes and geometry upstream and then have the Display SOP result cook the changes and give you the final result.

It may be better if you treat the shelf construction HDA as the last step and build proxy geometry that drives the final HDA that builds all the shelves at once. That proxy input could be the final shelf that is adjusted and then re-built again if you want. But the HDA has to be applied again to build a new result.

For example, if you are putting shelves in a warehouse, give the artist a tool that adds basic shelf stand-in assets. One at a time. Scale and position to suit using any transforms (Transform SOP or Edit SOP in tweak mode for example). Creative use of uv's can give you the impression of more or less books, etc. Give the stand in geo identifiers for front, type, etc. Use Cd colour as colour for shelves. Add attribute slots so that the artist can change the attributes at will. Put the text identifiers on the asset so the artist can read the current state if you want.

Then pass these stand-ins in to the Shelf construction asset and it spits out all the final shelf geometry using the attributes, even as Alembic Archives or Packed Primitives if you want. All this using the Current SOP upstream to the Display SOP.