Turn off recording of reference/assembly edits

[Anonymous]

Is there a way to turn off recording of reference/assembly edits within maya? For example, I want to translate a node inside an assembly, without actually creating an edit. Thanks.

[chaneyx]

I would like to know why you want to do that so as to provide a more tailored solution. You should be careful monkeying around with references as they are still very buggy. 

But if you have a need to here are some tips : 

+ Individual edits can be removed by opening the ReferenceEditor , right clicking over the referenced object and chosing File->List Reference Edits, and then selecting the edit you want to remove and clicking the "Remove Selected Edits" button which remove it entirely and not "bake" it into the current scene. 

+ If you want a mechanism by which to keep the transforms in the scene but not  have it appear on the reference edit list, you can group you referenced object within the scene and use that scene object as an offset transform. The act of grouping will be in the reference edits but none of the transforms you perform on that top level group will be. 

[Anonymous]

Haha yes I'm all too aware of the bugginess of assembly edits. We are using assembly nodes to represent assets in our scenes. And we take advantage of the edit tracking on assembly nodes to know what nodes have been modified. So when an artist works on a shot, they begin by bringing in an asset in the form of an assembly node, and they position or animate whatever subassembly nodes they wish. When it comes time to publish their work, we read their modifications via the edits on the assembly nodes, and write these changes as overrides to this particular asset in this particular shot. This is our maya publish system in a nutshell. Since we want to avoid passing around maya files as our primary data format, we need to be able to build this data back into Maya for the next artist to work on. So this involves loading the base (unmodified) asset back into maya, and applying the published overrides for that asset. But the process of applying these overrides back onto the assemblynode is in itself creating edits. We essentially want the asset with the overrides to be the new ground zero for this maya session. That way when we publish again, we are only publishing the modifications from that maya session, not the cumulative history of edits made to the asset. I've found a hacky way of getting this job done using the scriptNode command with the ignoreReferenceEdits flag, but I was hoping there was a more elegant solution.

[chaneyx]

Some people solve this sort of problem with nested references.

I have solved similar problems by having "build scripts" for lighting and dynamics. Nothing is referenced but scenes get built as needed. But this requires you to build a robust pipeline which is a lot of work. 

And of course, many people just write out ginormous alembic files because their network can support it.