Mark Tucker

I believe you are mistaken about the behavior of node.geometry(). It will not cook the SOP. If the SOP has already been cooked, then yes, it will return the geometry generated by this SOP the last time it cooked. But if the SOP has not been cooked, the geometry returned by node.geometry() will be empty.

LOPs is a little different from SOPs in regards to returning the last cooked result. This is because every SOP node keeps its own copy of the geometry it generated last time it cooked. LOPs do not keep a full USD stage for each LOP node. LOP nodes in a chain will generally share a USD stage, and edit and recompose this stage when you look at the cooked stage from one node then another in a chain. In Manual mode, even this recomposing is avoided, so the stage you get back from node.stage() may not be the same stage last cooked by that node. It may be the state of that shared stage as understood by some other node in the chain of LOP nodes.

One approach that might work would be to do both the initial SOP create (which imports the first frame of the geo and sets up the material bindings), and feed that into the geo clip sequence LOP. This will override most of the opinions of the SOP Create LOP, but will leave the material binding opinions untouched.

Yes, this organization of the layers is to be expected. Each connection to the multi-input of a sublayer LOP has to add a single sublayer to the stage. So if the stage connected to a sublayer node's multi-input has a bunch of sublayers on it, the layers need to be reorganized so that there is a single sublayer that can be added to the output stage that generates the same composed prims as the original stage. Making the strongest sublayer the new "root" layer, and all other sublayers as sublayers of this new root layer accomplishes these goals.

If you don't want the sublayers rearranged in this way by the Sublayer LOP, then the solution depends on what you _do_ want. If you want all the sublayers just added to the stage as separate sublayers, skip the Sublayer LOP completely. If you want all the sublayers connected to the multi-input made into sublayers on a common (but empty) root layer, just append a Configur eLayer LOP set to Start New Layer, and then append a Primitive LOP with the Primitive Paths left blank. This will create a new empty layer on the stage connected to the sublayer's multi-input. Then when the layers get reorganized, you'll have a single new (empty) sublayer on the stage's root layer, with a bunch of sub-sub-layers as (I assume) you intend.