I'm running into a problem trying to replicate the behavior of the reference node in H18.5:

As you can see in the screenshot on the left in 18.5 I could completely control the full path of the primitive, including the name. In H19 however it seems the name is set depending on the source - I can only control the path before.

From a pipeline perspective the old way was gold as in lighting we could build our scenes and didn't care if animation updated their camera. Now however, when the name changes, all nodes that use the (old) camera primitive as a parameter will fail and possibly silently where we don't notice until we render.

Is this a bug? If not, can the old behavior be achieved in another way?

The reference node has not changed. In 18.5 you're referencing the camera prim directly because it's the default or only top level prim, and in 19 it's referencing the parent of the camera since it's the default or first top level prim. If the same usd file with the same structure were referenced, it would be the same.

If the camera is coming from an alembic, then the difference could be down to the USD env var USD_ABC_XFORM_PRIM_COLLAPSE that collapses shapes with identity transforms with the parent transform.

I'm not sure I follow - both reference nodes point to the same file on disc in the screenshot.

marcosimonrbl
I'm not sure I follow - both reference nodes point to the same file on disc in the screenshot.

The file must be an alembic then, as the behavior has not changed. It could be the default value for the abc xform prim collapse changed between usd versions.

Ah yes sorry, the referenced file is an alembic. With "reference specific primitive" and a knowledge from the layout of the alembic I can achieve the same result.
I will try setting the USD_ABC_XFORM_PRIM_COLLAPSE env var you mentioned to get to the same result as before. Thanks!