Thomas Mangold

This is unfortunately not feature, but something which just costs time. Especially since 20.5 it can only be disabled in the USD Render ROP.

No way to check the emission on it's own in the viewport. One needs to create a point light and place it infinity so that it won't light anything.

It's utterly strange to force a front light onto the user. If all lights are disabled, it's for a reason. If a headlight is needed, easy to create one.

At least bring it back into the Karma render settings, so that the scene can be viewed without the headlight. Or introduce it as a global preference setting.

I highly appreciate your help!

Will still have to check the files though.

I made some progress in the meantime and I guess it's been your advice to "import as references" which made the difference. Suddenly it works. The python code with "AddReference()" does the job, "overwriting" the current low res mesh with the link to the high res one. Will post my code/scene later on so that hopefully somebody can profit from it too or tell me that this is the utterly wrong way to do it! : )

P.S.: Can my problem be that I'm trying to sublayer a mesh which is probably not a layer in terms of the USD definitions? I also recreated the stage with an inline sop loading the .usd high res files. Just without the proxy meshes.

/
____/parking_lot (xform)
________/cars (xform)
____________/car_a (mesh) -> high res mesh, purpose "render"
____________/car_b (mesh) -> high res mesh, purpose "render"
____________/...

Using a sublayer node with the stage tree as seen in my former post in the 1st input and this tree in the second input also does nothing, EXCEPT from coloring the "cars" xform" green.

I though it would override the car_a and additional cars as well. : (