Mark Tucker

There should be nothing special you need to do. The easiest way to get an Alembic file into LOPs is with a Sublayer or Reference LOP pointed at the alembic file. This definitely will just load the animated data. But also going through SOPs is something that other users have definitely done successfully. I don't think there is any trick to it. If you can post a simple alembic file or submit one to SideFX support maybe we can help figure out what's going wrong.

One thought: make sure that your Houdini frame range matches the frame range of the data in the Alembic file. Maybe on the playbar you just haven't reached the "animated" time range in your file?

Be careful with backslashes in node parameters. All string parameters are run through a parser to expand environment variables, and it treats backslashes as an escape character. So if you want to look for a backslash in an asset path, you have to double up the back slashes in the parm. Also, this node works on the un-resolved asset paths. I think USD asset resolution returns paths with backslashes, but maybe the actual asset path before being resolved is using forward slashes?

You might want to try using the python method to make sure that the asset paths being tested are what you expect (using print statements) and make sure that the node is at least capable of doing some replacement (which would narrow down the issue to how the LOP is doing the prefix test). Can you attach a simple hip file showing the issue?

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.