Automating rivet usage for many objects

[drossxyu]

I'm trying to figure out an efficient way of snapping lights to my headlight geometry on an exported alembic. The alembic is being exported outside of Houdini. I have 18 pieces of geometry that need lights attached and one way of doing this would involve creating a point group at the SOP level for each one and creating a corresponding rivet object that will parent the lights. Since the rivet object takes the average of each point in the point group I have to create 18 solo point groups ( as far as I understand ).

Is there a better way of doing this?

If I export my alembic with the vehicle at the origin on a frame before the animation starts perhaps I can place all of my lights once and have just one point/rivet combination. I'm trying to avoid this workflow as adding this extra frame will become a bit of a nuisance as the animation is changing frequently.

[edward]

Create points for the lights in SOPs whichever way is most convenient. It kinda depends on your situation. To now move the lights to the point positions, you'll need to use CHOPs. In a CHOPnet, use the Geometry CHOP to import those light positions in Animated Mode. You'll need to name the imported channels to some naming convention that matches your OBJ lights. Now just export this to your light Translate parameters. If you need rotations, then you can add some channels for them in CHOPs as well.