Tomas Slancik

while not direct answer to your question

but it should be safe for you to ignore any perceived nesting when accessing the parm as in Houdini the parameter on the node can't have the same name as another parameter no matter how deeply "nested" in folders it is

so node.parm("display") will give you the "display" parm regardless of which folder is visually nested in, as you can't have "display" in "custom" folder and another "display" anywhere else on the node

intuitively it looks like you have some negative values in your background instead of being just black

Maybe your issues stem from your specific workflow, which is likely not common in Houdini


You rarely expect attribute name changes to automatically alter all possible downstream branches as those changes may be very ambiguous and dangerous, likely not intended

You have plenty of options but it comes down to how you organize your scene and workflow

You can always rename your uva at the end after all the adjustments or at any point in the flow where such change is required
Or you can expression link the uv name on all your adjustments if you anticipate plugging in geos with different uv names
Or you can make subnet or hda out of those where name is linked to top level UI
...

Its difficult to know your usecase, but I'd definitely not expect materials to change which uvs they are using just because one of the objects they may be assigned to at some point in one of the nodegraph branches has the uv renamed at some point, especially since attribute renaming is likely done procedurally by a node during the flow and not as a one time rigid change to the scene

Maybe you can give an example of which apps you were using and what is the exact workflow you expect? Since I highly doubt there is software that would mess with which uvmap a material is using just to cater to uv name change on one of the objects its assigned to and therefore break all other objects look that still use previous uv name