Well, you say that they aren’t attached to the scene graph but the first one must be or control render will never be called.
So, you are just missing a bunch of other setup, I guess.
Real question is what are you actually trying to do? Because this is very strange.
Edit: in the second case you never geom.updateLogicalState() or geom.updateGeometricState()… I’m surprised it isn’t spewing errors.