Hi, new to solaris. I been using the configurestage node recently but can't figure out what's the difference between populate, load and mute. They seems have very close functionality. The concept is very fuzzy to me. Can anyone explain it?

Thanks!

These are related to USD concepts, meant to help working in Solaris/USD (they aren't saved out to USD, but they are saved into the .hip file):

• Populate - refers to population masks, which lets you mask off prim paths that USD will simply not compose or ignore (they will not show up in the SG Tree at all). Best way to ensure only prims you care about are composed, but also can be confusing if you need prims outside of the population mask
  
• Load - refers to payload [www.sidefx.com] loading and unloading, which is a way to open a scene more quickly. Assets authored with payloads will come in as just bounding boxes, until you specify which ones you want to see fully, and load just those payloads. H19 has a Component Builder toolset that helps in making USD assets w/ payloads more easily.
  
• Mute [www.sidefx.com] - this is layer muting, which can be a powerful way to disable opinions coming from different layers. Can be expensive to mute/unmute, as the whole stage has to recompose, since this changes the layer stack.
  

Hope this helps!

I understand it now, Thanks for the reply.