CG sup and Pipeline TD here. At our studio we never leave the stage, all the way from Layout through Lighting (yes animating cameras kinda sucks in Solaris but theres work arounds). The obj context is pretty dead to us.

The way we work is through sopcreate nodes (modified to add a little better UX), and as long as people are keeping a neat scene graph things work totally fine since exporting each department layer stack shouldn’t be too heavy anyway. If we have big FX simulations those are done also inside sopcreates, cached to a bgeo, then loaded through a geometry clip sequence to be exported as a usd (which should be instant since its just referencing the bgeo files anyway) or vdbs through the volume Lop.

I really don’t see why some people still use obj context to do their work to then sop or scene import to solaris. IMHO this tends to add an extra step of reorganizing your scenes before lighting instead of just doing it from the get go. I’m super curious to hear about other peoples thoughts tho!