1. For the setup to work, I have to remove pivot attribute before 'copytopoints2' which seems to the only way.


2. Check or uncheck the first row does not seem to have any influence over the final result. In other words, tweaking the first row "apply to" by "copying" does not work at all.


Is this a bug or something I don't understand?

I haven't seen the scene, but I don't think it's a bug.

Quoting from the documentation:
When you copy or instance geometry onto points, Houdini looks for specific attributes on the destination points to customize each copy/instance.
With "Pivot" attribute being the first attribute in the hierarchy
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/copy/instanceattrs.html [www.sidefx.com]

Then what does the "Attribute from Target" do? Do nothing but simply carry the attributes in the rows over to the output?

Telling "copy to point" node not to "apply to points by copying the pivot attribute" and it still will look for the pivot attribute when it exists?

Does not seem quite intuitive!

And I blame SideFx for the badly written documentation. Lots of times I feel difficult to interpret.

sda502
Then what does the "Attribute from Target" do? Do nothing but simply carry the attributes in the rows over to the output?

yes, you use Attribute from Target when you want to transfer specific attributes from the template points to the copied instances.