jsmack
Copy to points with packed prims or alembic prims is what I would consider the state of the art workflow--and solaris instancer node works roughly the same way. You can even skip the instancer node and import packed prims directly from sops--and they'll keep their instancing.
Thank you. I have this working now, (skipping the instancer node). But had to "pack" the geometry after the "copytopoints" node in the foreach loop so point colors and velocity would work in LOPs. BTW, cannot seem to get angular velocity (w) to work. Is this supported in Karma?
jsmak
For building instancing natively in LOPs, start with the same point cloud in sops as for copytopoints: with the transform attributes, instance identifier (variant)...
Have not got to this yet... am still trying to understand what the "instance identifier (variant)" is. Is this an attribute on the target points with a path to geometry in the network or on disk? (Still so much USD vocabulary & concepts to learn.)