Houdini USD Asset Workflow - How to correctly author looks

According to the docs, I reference my asset in my shading task.
I directly load the usdAsset, and not any of the sublayers.
Then I add a layer break, materiallibrary and assign my materials.

So far so good. This works.

I then publish my asset as usd in the look layer

However, when I now load this asset (Loas Asset(LOPSs)), my materials are missing.

According to houdini, the looks layers are loaded correctly though:

Also, when I now to republish my asset from the shading task, I get a
“There are outdated containers in the scene.” error because the asset version got bumped to a new version on the last publish. I understand why this happens, but if feels weird.

Seems like you already have a look published (Main) which could be another variant. Have you tried setting the variant you want with a setvariant kop?

Yes, I tried to set a variant, and it didn’t work because of a reference error.

However, I was able to fix both my issues by referencing the model layer instead of the whole asset in my shading workfile.

Hey,

Validate Outdated Containers is useful to help artists not forgetting to update their scenes.
and since it’s an optional validator, artists can disable it in the publisher.

A typical USD workflow, to use mutlayers.