So it's possible that I'm approaching this wrong, but my understanding of how USD was made to be used is that artists would usually import a shot.usd file, mute geometry or even entire department layers contained within it, do their work, and then save out their new content to their department's <department>.usd layer, thus making it available to any other artists that pulled in shot.usd.

However I'm running into a few issues with actually replicating this workflow in Solaris. For instance, while I can mute layers in the viewport using the Scene Graph Layer editor, I can't figure out how to mute them in the actual node graph. Also I would love to be able to do a targeted replace of what versions of a department layer the shot.usd file is sublayering in rather than rebuilding the shot.usd from scratch every time.

Am I misunderstanding how to use USD?

What you describe is certainly one common way to use USD. To mute layers in the node graph, use the Configure Stage LOP. To update shot.usd to use a new department layer, use the Layer Replace or Edit Target Layer LOPs. Note that if you want to update shot.usd to use fx_02.usd instead of fx_01.usd, you might want to update shot.usd to shot_02.usd as well. But whether you want to go that route or not, the Layer Replace and/or Edit Target Layer are the nodes to look at. If you will be overwriting shot.usd every time, you might want to make it "shot.usda" instead, because it probably doesn't contain much data (just a bunch of layers to add as sublayers), and if you're on Windows, using USDA avoids a lot of potential file locking issues.

Thanks MTucker! Those are just what I was looking for.

Do you know of any other common workflows for USD that I might want to consider as well?

mtucker
using USDA avoids a lot of potential file locking issues.

Hi Mark

This is a golden nugget. Thanks for the heads up.

Best

Ashen
Do you know of any other common workflows for USD that I might want to consider as well?

That's like asking "do you know of any ways that I should be using Houdini?"... There are a million answers, highly dependant on what you want to accomplish. There are tons of videos and other information about USD in general, about using USD in specific scenarios, about how various studios use USD in their pipelines. Lots of good links from right here at sidefx.com (https://www.sidefx.com/learn/talks/, [www.sidefx.com] look in the Solaris category).