Hey everyone,
Yesterday I was at a presentation of someone from Double Negative (dneg).
He briefly dropped that they swap the representations of geometry a lot in Maya based on what he named assets.
I know Assets (originally Containers?) are not made for representation swapping, so I expect he just misnamed Assemblies.
Pros
Some time ago I did some delving into Scene Assembly, but at the time I ditched it pretty quickly as being unusable.
Based on the presentation I had a quick look again, and the built-in representation swapping is a sweet benefit.
I also dig that all Assemblies come with a root transform, so they can be moved across the scene consistently. Sweet stuff.
Cons
But, they don’t support Render Layers.
Also they don’t support Relationship Edits. God, why? 
This also means one can’t do shader assignments on the actual imported scene assembly.
They can’t be referenced, but as a possible reference replacement that doesn’t have to be a deal-breaker in the long run.
Solution?
So I dig the fact that it can easily swap representations and preserve its top transform information (because it always has a root transform).
On the other hand it’s a bummer it blocks a lot of the ways one is used to working with references.
From the API I know one can implement its own MPxFileTranslator to ‘reference’ a custom file format. (Did anyone here do that?)
I’m not sure if it’s possible to trigger build-in file translators (like alembic, gpuCache, maya files, etc.).
If so one could implement it’s own MPxFileTranslator that would behave as the representation swapping base just loading the currently active format.
That way you get all the benefits of referencing + the benefits of scene assembly.
[ul]
[li]Does anyone know whether that could work?
[/li][li]Or what other solutions is everyone using?
[/li][li]Does anyone use Scene Assembly? And for what part of their pipeline?
[/li][/ul]
Cheers,
Roy