Belal

It would be great if we can set the name of a node with global variables and channels especially in Solaris.

Thanks for information, I see what you mean.

I believe that yes as you also mentioned, resolving and building all of it in the usd_rop itself would help, my aim was to be able to get a one clean scene description file that at least doesn't flatten the binary data from the incoming referenced usds/alembics into the new file for any reason but to keep them references to their original files on disk.

The usd_rop to have an additional "Save Style" called "Flatten Stage (Preserve all sublayers and references)" that flattens any node that isn't a sublayer or file reference inside the same saved USD stage file that has everything else referenced as sublayer or payload.

The current behavior:
Houdini is generating intermediate USDs that were never requested and references them in the final generated stage (this behavior is not recommended especially from a pipeline point of view), we have to have control on what files is getting generated and we have to be able to name them and decide where they will be saved before they do (and most importantly to have track of them - as with this current behavior, you don't know what are the intermediate files that will written out during the usd_rop evaluation).

The desired behavior:
usd_rop should have the ability to write just one USD stage, that has all references and sublayers written as references (not flattened), while every other user nodes like graft, transform... etc., should be flattened in the same USD stage file (rather than being written to external intermediate usd files).