I think I already know the answer, but is there any way to tell a Subnet to display guide geometry (As per the Guide Geometry field you can point to an internal node in the asset definition window)... without actually creating an asset?

I'd prefer to just have a node I can copy-paste between scenes without managing asset definitions if possible...

...but I suspect the answer is just "use digital assets - that's what they're for"
Figured it couldn't hurt to ask :-)

Yes this is an HDA only feature.

But one trick you can use is to show the "guide geometry" as the first output and the actual output as the second output. I have seen some HDAs that do this in production so they have real geometry as the display result of the HDA while the actual result is at the second output.

animatrix_
Yes this is an HDA only feature.

But one trick you can use is to show the "guide geometry" as the first output and the actual output as the second output. I have seen some HDAs that do this in production so they have real geometry as the display result of the HDA while the actual result is at the second output.

Cheers for the clarification, and the suggestion. Yeah, I've done similar myself, but that still requires separate setting of display flag and template flag to show the "guide" overlaid with the output.

Guess the simplest approach would be to just merge the guide geometry with the main output, and then have a node afterwards that deletes it again... messy, but it'd get the job done. Shame there's no way to set gl_wireframe per-primitive...

...or, I just use digital assets of course.

VortexVFX
...or, I just use digital assets of course.

if your hesitation about creating an HDA is from the fact that its usually an external file that has to be managed
keep in mind that you can create an Embedded HDA in which case it's definition is always stored internally in the hip file
bringing in all the advantages of an HDA with convenience of a subnet

tamte
if your hesitation about creating an HDA is from the fact that its usually an external file that has to be managed
keep in mind that you can create an Embedded HDA in which case it's definition is always stored internally in the hip file
bringing in all the advantages of an HDA with convenience of a subnet

Cheers, yeah, this is one route I'm exploring.

Do you know if there's a way to copy-paste an embedded HDA definition between scenes at the same time as copy-pasting an instance of that asset? As it stands, it'll throw a missing definition error if I don't unlock the node, copy-paste, then save definition in the new scene, before re-syncing the node.