If I use a Configure Primitive LOP to set the purpose to “guide” for some geometry, it no longer appears in the viewport, as expected, but how do I enable rendering guide geometry? I’ve tried several approaches:

* Adding “guide” to the Included Purposes in a Render Settings node.
* Adding an includedPurposes parameter to a Karma Render Settings node.
* Adding “guide” to the Husk > Rendering > Purpose parameter in a USD Render ROP.

None of these approaches makes the geometry visible. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
Tim

Can you share a hip file that shows the issues you're having? I'm attaching an example that hopefully helps.

Of the three things you mentioned...
1 - This should work, except the ROP by default overrides it. See the right-most chain in the example file.
2 - I wouldn't expect this to work.
3 - This should work, and I'm surprised to hear it doesn't. See the middle chain in the example file, which should be the same as what you've described.

Thanks so much for the example, it immediately revealed my mistake: I didn't have a camera, so my renders were going to be empty no matter what I did. With that corrected, the guide geometry is visible in renders to disk and mplay once includedPurposes is set. It seems to me that the USD Render ROP should produce an error when rendering without a valid camera, like the Mantra ROP. I get that authoring a USD without a camera can be a reasonable part of a larger workflow, but I assume that would go through a USD ROP.

That leads me to my next question, which is how to make the guide geometry visible in the viewport? Even with the viewport using the same render settings as the ROPs, the guide geometry isn't visible. I've scanned through the viewport display options without seeing anything related to purpose. Ideally, I'd like to have an easy way to enable/disable guide geometry rendering in the viewport, since that seems to be what purpose=guide is for?

Thanks again for your help,
Tim

tshead
how to make the guide geometry visible in the viewport?

There's a little icon that controls which purposes are/aren't visible

So, right in front of my nose then …

Thanks for pointing that out!

Cheers,
Tim