We are rendering with Arnold so all our meshes must be unpacked. We have an unpack node at the very end of our SOPs to make sure the meshes are unpacked. Sometimes our users might unpack our meshes or part of our meshes to manipulate point attributes before it reaches our unpack node.

I'm wondering what would be quicker : Should we just leave the unpack there and at worst case, it unpacks something that already is unpacked or would it be quicker to check through the mesh to find if/which are packed and only unpack those? Like should I create an Attribute Wrangle that creates a group based on the instrinsics typename and operate the unpack just on that group or is it going to be as fast to simply leave the unpack node there and let it do it's thing?

MathieuLeclaire
…Like should I create an Attribute Wrangle that creates a group based on the instrinsics typename and operate the unpack just on that group …

yes, definitely do that
as there are some weird behaviors of unpack node
like unpack deletes all isolated points for some reason and you probably don't want that

but thanks to incredibely fast support of SESI you may not need to do that anymore

Houdini 16.0.784 The Unpack SOP now preserves any unshared points from the input geometry.

Houdini 16.5.287 The Unpack SOP now preserves any unshared points from the input geometry.