Rob Pieké

Thanks for clarifying #1. This would be a sensible future area of investigation for us. We do provide "baked-in" controls for this via the Render Geometry Settings (https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/lop/rendergeometrysettings.html), but for deferred rendertime evaluation we currently only support what's in the vanilla USD specification.

If you could log an RFE for this, that would be great!

1 - We didn't have plans to add a Karma-specific tab. What would you expect to see there?

2 - That's a good observation and sounds like something for us to address. Can you please log this bug?

3 - This is a USD design thing - https://openusd.org/dev/user_guides/collections_and_patterns.html#configuring-relationship-mode-collections [openusd.org]

What is exposed in Solaris right now is the USD Render Pass node in its vanilla state, along with support in husk for pass-driven rendering (i.e., you can specify the pass you want to render) and in Karma for "visibility" (global, camera, matte) overrides.

We do have Context Options (https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/ref/contextoptions.html) in Solaris which would - at least largely - enable what you're after, and you can absolutely treat them as a pass-management system. Conditional overrides to a light, for example, will push you outside what the USD Render Pass can offer, which means you'll need to author per-"pass" USD files. In contrast, if you limit your overrides to the visibility controls offered by the Render Pass, you can author a single USD file with several passes.

There is definitely an interesting space here for further tooling&workflow design, with a multitude of potential solutions.

Hopefully that provides more clarity than confusion