Expanding assembly reference hierarchies

After creating assembly reference hierarchies, you can continue building your large scene or layout by creating another level of assembly definitions that contain assembly references. This workflow potentially provides access to massive data sets from within the a single Maya scene file. For example, you can:

• Add a Maya scene file that contains multiple assemblyReference nodes as a Scene representation.
• Create an Alembic cache that includes the same production assets as the multiple assemblyReference nodes. Add this cache to the assembly definition node as a Cache representation.

With this workflow, you can continuously build up the production asset while accessing and switching between all the representations in the Scene Assembly hierarchy. If different versions of the building are required for specific shot sequences, you can switch between these variations as Scene representations when required.

In the following illustration, a Scene Assembly hierarchy is defined at the top level by the City_AR.ma assemblyReference node. In this arrangement, it is possible to switch the Scene representation defined by Bld_AD.ma, from the City_AR.ma assemblyReference node.

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