I’m trying to set up an animated gobo in Solaris. I’ve got an image sequence set as a texture on an area light ($4.png at the end of the path), and it plays correctly frame by frame.

The issue: the light (and all downstream nodes) get time samples (green clock icon). From what I understand, you want to avoid that by either setting the node to Sample Frame Range or caching/referencing it back. But doing that stops the image sequence from animating on my light.

How can I keep the image sequence animation without introducing time samples downstream? Is it as problematic as leaving animated geometry uncached?