Mark Tucker

Settings point to products. So picking a different Settings prim picks a different (set of) Product(s) implicitly. Providing an explicit product specification would be redundant. I think it's probably just as easy to do in your USD file by making a new render settings prim (referencing an existing settings prim) and overriding the Products relationship yourself.

I suspect you need to change the way you're authoring that "overlay" layer so that /Character_GEO is "untyped" (or a pure "Over" prim) rather than a "Defined" Xform prim. As you've currently authored this layer, referencing it onto /root/Armature/Character_GEO will turn your Skel prim into an Xform prim. You probably also don't want /Character_GEO to be marked as a "Component". The Kind of this prim should be left blank.

I would suggest an explore variants node (to create an instance of the asset for each variant selection combination) and an animated prune LOP to change the visibility of the variants so that only one is visible at a time. This follows the rules of USD (visibility can be animated, variant selection cannot be) which means you could even write this to a single USD file and render it all as a sequence.