Chris Rydalch

Follow Parent Context is built on a very old feature in Houdini, one that predated the existence of subnets, I'm told. The Texture Material Library motivated fixing/updating it, but the intent is you can work in a sub-context such as Copernicus, while keeping the Viewport viewing the parent LOP network; and it lets you switch the viewport back and forth easily. And regardless of how many subnets deep you might be working, you can still view the parent context (such as the render in LOPs) while still working in COPs.

Pinning isn't a complete solution because as soon as you un-pin, you have to navigate back and re-pin the viewer. So Follow Parent Context helps you bounce back and forth, as viewer states are an important reason to be able to bounce back/forth. This is demonstrated here in the H22 launch video: https://youtu.be/Arzhko0h8xk?t=6245 [youtu.be]

Hope this helps, we'll clarify the docs a bit too.

The closest equivalent in LOPs/USD of SOP geometry groups, is GeomSubsets [www.sidefx.com]. You can turn primitive groups into geomsubsets, this is an option on the SOP Import/SOP CReate; points/edges aren't yet possible on the USD side (it's getting closer, I believe). Hope this helps!

What are you Shift+LMB clicking in the scene? I can imagine if a parameter were locked on the node, that might interfere with the state adjusting the focus distance correctly? It sounds like a bug, but I'm unable to reproduce it in a simple scene.