I want to read a texture value and copy the colors onto a point attribute, so I use the Texture VOP with the <UDIM> token in the texture path and everything reads OK… in most cases. Problem is I have this asset that has it's UVs split on 5 UDIM tiles, but we only have 4 texture files. We do this because we use Arnold to render and Arnold has a default color value option you can use when the texture is missing. So since the geometry on tile 1005 is a constant color, we use this value instead of creating a map for it, which works well in Arnold… but in Houdini, this situation raises an error.

The only solution I see is to use a Python SOP to first check which UDIM files actually exists and then use a switch to decide if the current UVs are on an existing tile or not.

Is this the simplest solution to this problem or does anybody have other ideas or suggestion on how to deal with such a scenario?

you can use expand_udim() [www.sidefx.com] VEX function that can check if file exist for you so should be straightforward