Hey everyone,

I've been examining whether my payloads have been set up how I expected on assets and have noticed that any variant sets I had on my component prim don't seem to be accessible when I sublayer my asset onto the stage with the "load payloads" option disabled.

I seem to be missing something about how "lofting" info above the payload works - I'm using the Loft Payload Info node *after* creating my payload layer and payloading that "payload" file into my asset root usd layer.

• This creates the "extentsHint" attribute, which correctly gives me my bounding box when payloads are not loaded
  
• It *doesn't* seem to loft any variant sets.
  
• This makes me suspect there may be other info not being lofted.
  

Reading documents and watching some of pixars videos around usd, the idea of "lofting" data above the payload seems to be about pushing the extents and prim type, but also variants, or other data that I might want to access to change without loading the payload.

Is the Loft Payload Info node the way i'm meant to go about doing this? I don't see many options on the node in houdini 19.5 beyond specifying the primitive to act upon (this would be my asset root prim/component, correct?) and "set primitive statistics" (which, ticking on doesn't seem to add the variant sets either). I'm wondering how this node knows what to loft.

Any info to point me in the right direction around this would be appreciated thanks!

That node lofts the prim type, extents, kind, and can set a color (so not all your assets show up as indistinguishable white boxes), and calculate statistics about the contained prims (prim count, mesh faces, etc) which might be useful for pipeline purposes. The docs for this node have fallen woefully out of date though. I'll do a pass to make sure all this information is mentioned.

Variant sets are not lofted, though this capability probably could be added (it's just a bit complex because variant sets can appear anywhere, and selecting one variant can alter the sub-variant sets that are available - detecting and replicating this hierarchy of choices would be no small feat.

Thanks for the info on that mtucker, it helps to know that i'm looking for something that isn't there!

Hopefully this is something that could be part of vanilla tools in the future, but for now i'll take this as an opportunity to learn how to do it myself.