I guess this is a very common use case in Houdini, but I couldn't figure out an automatic way. I need to switch between a low poly and a high poly model at the start of a network and want to use the low poly for display in the viewport and the high poly for rendering. I don't want to copy the whole SOP chain and use the display/render flags at the end. My approach was to have a switch right at the beginning of the SOP chain, but I couldn't figure out a script condition to find out whether it's for the viewport or for rendering.

How is this usually done?

Many thanks
Marc

Put your high and low res geo into subnet with Render Flag on High res and Display on Low res geo

Then during interactive session that subnet will output low res (display flag) and during render or caching the high res (Render Flag) which will then flow through the same downstream Sop chain

Many thanks, that's it. I really appreciate your help.

I didn't manage to make this work in Solaris. It always loaded the geometry with the display flag. I know use a "Configure Primitive" LOP in Solaris to set one version of the geo to "Proxy" and the other one to "Render".