Let's say I have a character animation I've imported for lookdev and I want to replace the eye geometry by creating new polygons in a SOP Modify. The original geometry is made up of 5 meshes, but my new geometry is only 3 meshes. Is there a way I can conveniently prune or deactivate the extra meshes from the USD tree once I've made my new geometry? It would be ideal to do all of this within the SOP logic, where the decision to prune or not might lie.

I guess I could always generate an attribute that gets imported into LOPs that I can then use to prune with.

You could set s@usdvisibility = 'invisible';in a prim wrangle to hide the old meshes. It's not SOP logic, but you could also put a Configure Prim after the sop modify, which has the prim pattern of the original 5 meshes, to deactivate them post-SOP Modify.

Thanks for the suggestion, Configure Prim seems like the best way at the moment. Some kind of masking usd attribute that gets read by SOP Import might be useful, though.

Has this been resolved yet?

I was just looking for a way to do this as well. Would love for there to be a way to translate a SOP attribute to pruning in LOPs when using SOP Modify or SOP Import.

Using the output of the Visibility SOP for example would be nice.

And using similar logic, translating the Alembic Visibility to Pruning when importing Alembic Geometry to LOP and layering it on input geometry.