For reasons of trying to keep things clean, I created a base object (a cube geo resized to the 2-of-3 dimensions I needed, with no greebling or anything) that is to be used 4 times (it's flat side “skirts” of a table). Since the long-side are of different size than the short-side ones, I wanted a single base object at/as identity for the length to make positioning and especially scaling as obvious as possible for the copyxform's.

I then created 4 copyxform's with this geo as src, applying pos, rot and scaling based on input from other objects (the legs of the table - on those I did keep the master object as “leg1” and did not face this problem).

The problem I'm facing now, is that I can't find a way to not-display that “template” object. I want it not visualized neither in OpenGL nor in render. I tried the Visibility node, but that didn't seem to help.

Is what I want even possible? I have plowed through documentation and samples, but I have not encountered this specific scenario, and I'm currently stuck. Any help/hints would be appreciated.
As I have less than 4 hours hands-on experience with Houdini, please be gentle. :-)

H16.5.473

Could you post a HIP file?

If you're talking about guide geometry, I seem to recall that you can disable that either by right-clicking on the node state button on the left of the viewport and unchecking the guide you'd like to disable, or turning off all guide geometry in the Display Options.

However, guide geometry never shows up in renders, as far as I know, so I'm not sure that's what you're talking about. If something is showing up in renders, it must have the display/render flag on. If the thing you don't want displayed is an object, you can uncheck the object's display flag. If it's a SOP in a network and you want a different node displayed, set the display flag to the SOP you'd like displayed.

I have since solved it, though maybe someone else also new to Houdini could benefit from the solution I found.

I had a box node I intended to use as “master” object, placed at (0,0,0) to make placement of the instantiations of it easier. The error I hade made was I used 4 copyxform nodes (inside the same geo), hoping to be able to disable the “master” object from both OpenGL and render display while keeping the copies.

One workaround I found was to place the box inside another geo, then instantiate it inside the target geo using an object merge, and then turning on bypass on the other geo.

I then realized what I needed was simply different transform nodes (without copy), and managed to simplify the whole thing quite a bit.

HIP is attached. I'd appreciate any ideas to simplify or improve this. I'm f.ex. not convinced all my use of ch() is the correct/most efficient way to get the geo's properties (see its “Table dimensions” parameters).