Chris Rydalch

Bah, forgot to add: can you clarify what you mean by this?

You can only load one usd file into the assets at a time. All previously added assets will vanish and cause issues when you open the file again.

Is this referring to replacing references on assets/instances by the Layout LOP?

Yes, the Layout LOP does have issues. Please log the Bugs/RFE's via the webform. There are a lot of moving parts to the Layout LOP, and it's often difficult to reproduce (even when it feels super obvious and happens with no effort at all). We've had to do some resource shuffling, so as much detail, along with hip files and/or recordings you can attach to bugs/rfes, would be a big help!

One of those items I can address, is the variant selection on assets. This was a deliberate choice to simplify the layout asset gallery and this node's first implementation, so that it could even be released. The asset gallery's underlying code isn't dynamic to support changing variants on an asset. Combinations of VariantSets complicate the UX and implementation significantly as well. So the Component Output LOP supports "Variant Layers", which handles writing out variant layers w/ thumbnails that the asset gallery can digest.

Again, feel free to log RFE's for this and other features mentioned, of course! But just wanted to share some of the reasoning behind the choices.

Yeah Beta XPU doesn't yet support the various BSDFs. You will not be able to create standard surface from scratch and render with XPU. Even if you build a nodedef/nodegraph using those python scripts.