Hi,

I hope the title doesn't provoke too much eye-rolling! I was reading Matt Estela's notes about weaning himself off sublayers but I'm not able to use reference to perform the same function.

Attached is a network that describes a hypothetical lookdev scenario where the decisions (material assign and geometry settings) for LD are stored as a seperate layer. Importing them back as a sublayer works (in that it renders as expected).

I'm clearly fumbling with some basic concepts but to me it seems that reference is working mainly for importing ‘things’ into the scene graph in the current layer and sublayer is working for importing decisions (e.g. prim attribute modifications).

The second network is a hypothetical sublayer workflow describing two lookdev stages (basic + advanced) where the later, advanced decisions are in the later, stronger layer. Again, not something I'm getting with the reference node workflow.

Cheers,

J

You can do overrides with references, but your overrides need to be confined to the section of the scene graph into which the reference is being added. And the primitive paths for the overrides must be relative to the location where the overrides are going to be brought in, not relative to the root of the scene.

In such a workflow you would probably have multiple USD files referenced by the same primitive (reference both rock.usd and rock_shot_overrides.usd onto /world/props/rock). The list of references on a single prim effectively act like a sublayer stack, but applied only to that primitive and its descendants.

Ah cool thanks!

I think I get but I'll see if I can break it when I have a more complex setup :p I'm thinking in general that references make more sense when building/assembling stuff (such as individual asset or the assembly for an environment) and that sublayers work better for storing changes to the original assemblies. Although I know they could be used interchangeably they do also seem to manifest themselves differently in the Scene Graph Layers Panel.

J