So, I`ve got a setup that I generate a USD asset with wedges as variants.
What I need is to have the variants animated.
I use for each loop to get let`s say 5 wedges as variants on the usd main asset
I use pdginput expression to read the files from tops in the file sop and works fine
with the single non animated geometry.

How do you add animation into the USD asset?
I`ve already animated procedurally each variant and cached the geo.

pdginput inside file sop with animated pdg output reads variant1 frame 1 then variant1 frame2.So variants become frames of the 1st wedge.

I tried loading the geo with: "filename.`@ITERATION`.$F.bgeo.sc" but for some reason it can`t read @ITERATION

So can anyone suggest a workflow that p.e iterates on all frames of variant 1 then variant 2.

Confused? me too so i`ll attach an example hip file to make sense with the specific setup.

Thanks in advance.

Same person here just saw I had logged in with google on op.

If anyone`s interested I found a solution.

So, I just found that I had to use: contextoption("ITERATION") instead of `@ITERATION` in the filename and it works !

Now is there a way to access pdg work items(like pdginput but with frames too)instead of reading generated files on disk?

An even better option would be to only generate the usdc geometries and the final usda only.
Given that ram capacity is sufficient.
Without the need for all these intermediate geometry.
I mean all those writes are taking away valuable lifespan of the ssd.

Now the only way I found for pdginput to work is to write geo to disk.

Thanks in advance!

The pdginput/pdgoutput functions query input/output file paths from the work items, so they only apply to files.

The ROP Fetch TOP, and derived nodes like the ROP Geometry and ROP USD, cook their work items in separate child processes. This is because they cannot cook in parallel/in the background if they run inside the main Houdini process, and because when they run on the farm they always cook out of process anyway. In order to load geometry produced from a different work item, they have to load it from a file on disk using pdginput.