This is a quick tip / quality of life improvement.

Let's say you have two Houdini sessions open on a Windows: the first one is exporting an Alembic file and the second one is reading it. If you try to delete / overwrite the Alembic file that is already loaded into the second Houdini session, it will fail.

We can confirm that Houdini is keeping the Alembic file open with the File Locksmith.

One option for fixing this is to close the second Houdini session, delete / overwrite the Alembic file and the start the session again.

But that is slow and unnecessary. There is a better way, in the second Houdini session:

1. Display a Null SOP or another node, so that the geometry from the Alembic file is not visible in the viewport
   • Alternatively you can keep the display flag on the Alembic SOP node and switch to Render View, or another pane
2. Press the Reload Geometry button on the Alembic SOP node
3. Done, you can now delete / overwrite the Alembic file