I’ve been watching some tutorials about Solaris to see if I want to use it for my solo art. In a couple of the videos, the authors suggested that SideFX’s future intent is for us to use SOPCreate nodes to embed all geometry creation in Stage/LOPS. In other words, OBJ will become obsolete. This seems like an odd and disorganized way of working. If that is the intent, I’d expect the app to be much more significantly redesigned to support such an approach. Also, other tutorials seem to imply Solaris is just for final layout/lighting/shot design/rendering (which was my original impression) and that building/sim/etc. still happens in OBJ.

Is there a clear point of view on how this stuff is intended to be used, or is Solaris just a bunch of open-ended tools left to interpretation by the user?

SOP Create is just a handy bridge back to /obj. It's the same thing as creating a geo container in /obj and using a SOP Import to bring it into Solaris. Pick your poison.

If you would rather organize your work in /obj and pull that into /stage via sceneimport/sop import that’s totally fine.

Alternatively if you feel /obj isn’t adding anything to your workflow you can skip it by using sopcreate.

LOP networks currently have a huge performance overhead if you are doing animation work that involves multiple deforming SOPs, camera moves, interactive tweaks, etc., mostly it seems due to time dependencies causing lots of unnecessary cooking in LOP networks.

Until that changes the old /obj workflow isn't going anywhere. That said, if you are just generating self-contained geometry, a SOP Create is a pretty good option, especially now that you can look through the LOP camera while working within the SOP context.