Hi @adrianmeyerart , you could follow up with SideFX to see if they plan to support muting as a persistent operation in the context of Solaris… though because USD itself does not support it, it would be non-portable. While we are open to being persuaded otherwise, we see muting as a session-based, more limited functionality, whereas expression variables provide alot more power (including the ability to drive variant selections). Eventually I would imagine rendering tools (including usdrecord) to support command-line options that either allow you to directly specify expression variable overrides or (like usdview) specify a session layer for the stage that contains overrides. It may take a beat or two for that to happen, though.