object looping & transform extraction - faster than foreach

[meeotch]

Is there a faster way of looping through individual objects (where "object" refers to a group of primitives) than using a foreach SOP - perhaps in VOPs/VEX?

 

The context is trying to extract transforms for a bunch of shattered pieces, given only the rest frame and current frame.  Currently, I'm using a foreach looping over a primitive Name attribute (not groups), to build a coordinate system for each piece, but with several thousand pieces, it's very slow.

 

I realize that there are various ways of skinning this (or any) specific cat in Houdini, and I know about the DOPImport Create Points option.  In this particular case, I'm taking the output from one DOP sim breaking it into two frame-dependent changing object streams, and injecting those into another DOP sim, rinse, repeat.  This quickly leads to a situation where the transforms coming out of the last DOPnet are relative to a very weird looking "creation" frame.  Hence, my desire to obtain "clean" transforms by just extracting them from the geo - which would also allow me to get transforms relative to an arbitrary rest position of my choosing.  A good tool for the general kit.

 

So that's one thing - solving this particular case.  But I feel like there's a broader question here related to Houdini's general philosophy of treating geo in bulk, rather than as individual objects in a hierarchy.  It feels like translating between blobs of polygons and objects with transforms would be a common enough operation that there'd be a fast built-in for it - in the same way that going in/out of a DOPnet or packed primitives requires such a transform.