Hey OP, a phrase I've seen being thrown around concerning Houdini is that most things in the application start with SOPs (That is Surface Operators, or geometry operations) and end with SOPs. Meaning in order to start becoming comfortable with Houdini you must learn how to modify geometry, this includes direct modeling which you can certainly do. I recommend this course [www.udemy.com] by indie-pixel to get started. It approaches the problem with a hybrid of direct and procedural modeling, each employed when it is appropriate to do so. I find it to be an excellent introduction. It does lean on the lengthy side but it is worth in order to start getting comfortable with Houdini. After this I recommend hipflask tutorials which covers fundamentals quite deeply, making sure they stay with you in the future.

Concerning your original question I think it is worth learning modeling in Houdini because at the end of the day it is an application built to modify 3D geometry and it lets you do so very well. In fact it grants you that possibility so efficiently it then becomes a matter of you learning how to employ its tools for your needs. But rest assured that Houdini has the sufficient tools to mostly do what you want.

Hope you find the response useful.

Yup thanks! I digged into the Solaris demo files and found that when loaded in as reference it saved them out in their own layer. I'm still struggling to understand how LOPS are actually creating the layers, copying them into each other, etc. Thanks for the reply hopefully someone finds this useful!

Hi,

I was following along the Solaris Workshop and in the Prep Asset workshop, where Jeff Wagner sets up three SOP Create nodes with different barrels he checks “layer save path”. (Your text to link here… [youtu.be]).
From what I gather this should save individual usd files for every Barrel in .usdc format alongside the rest of the configured usd paths, am I right? Because i'm getting everything else saved to disk except the individual barrels usd files. Don't know what I'm missing. The network setup is the same followed in the video. Don't know what I'm missing, any help with this would be great thx.