Hi - hope someone can help. I've got some animated foliage (cactus spikes) that I want to scatter over a large area. There's 16 variants, and approx 5,000 spikes.
I want to control the animation with a falloff, so the spikes open and close in waves.

First thought - Alembic Delayed Load! Perfect. Variant attribute is saved nicely, copy to points works great - and using setprimintrinsic(0, "abcframe", @primnum, @retime, "set") to control time. However, this causes glitching and error issues - there's aggressive caching and the instances aren't responding correctly.

So... packed disk sequences. Great - using setprimintrinsic(0, "index", @primnum, targetFrame); I can control the frame with an attribute.
However, when loading the geo is treated as one object, and I can't use the variant attribute. It places all 16 animations on each of the 5000 points.

So the question - is there a way to instance packed disk sequences respecting a variant attribute, and allow for control of time? Or should I save the 16 variations as individual sequences and load them that way?

Packed Disk Sequences are deprecated and you shouldn't rely on them.

If you're not using Solaris the best thing to do is copy the same Alembic packed primitive to every point, then set the abcframe intrinsic like you were after the copy operation. Don't expect the viewport to respond properly, but the render will work as you'd expect. For quick debugging in the viewport you're best off unpacking a handful of primitives as a test.

If this is still extremely heavy you might have too many variants. Even when instancing the same Alembic to every point, each unique time offset is more or less a completely new geometry. If you can limit the number of variants you're instancing by quantizing your falloff animation offsets you'll save a lot of time.