Previewing oceans with the Expand Procedural lop, is it possible to tweak parameters having no effect on displacement without Houdini re-evaluation the dicing each time?

Unfortunately at this time we don't have any fine-grained dependency tracking. When you say "tweak parameters having no effect on displacement", do you mean on the same node or on a different node?

Mainly on that node, tweaking the included shaders or foam parameters.

Being able to get a better visualization of the foam without having to expand the procedural would be a nice substitute if dependency tracking is impossible.

Tanto
Being able to get a better visualization of the foam without having to expand the procedural would be a nice substitute if dependency tracking is impossible.

Both dicing and evaluating ocean spectrum as well as outputting cusp and foam attributes are part of the same compiled graph, so I assume if you touch any of the parameters that are used as overrides by invoke graph, the dicing needs to recook also

But this may improve in the future, especially since 21 Houdini supports Hydra 2.0, which potentially provides more robust and native framework for procedurals, which I'm sure SESI will explore

Good to know. Hopefully this can be addressed in a future release. Currently working on a scene where dicing takes 5-6 minutes. Weirdly, decreasing the viewport quality to almost 0 seems to have a very limited effect on that time. Makes it a pain to adjust foam parameters.

as a workaround maybe you can create a geometry group on your ocean geo, which gets translated to stage as GeomSubset prim
then in Ocean Procedural you can provide this group name in Geometry/Group parameter and the procedural will dice only that part for faster tweaking

also dicing only adds polygons so it's better to start much sparser geo, viewport quality should have great impact in that case

Creating a preview group is a great idea, will try that. The part of my geo I most need to tweak is a meshed fluid sim, so unfortunately pretty dense.