Just checking if anybody was experienced with this who can share advantages/ disadvantages and pitfalls to be aware of.

Ref editor basically like xref in Max.

Our company has multiple studios and I'm finding out if this is a good way to co-op on single scenes or multi-parted models. Or if there's a more practical method or tool.

Well, it should be, providing nothing on your scene absolutely relies on anything from their scene (ie. joints in a referenced scene being skin weighted to meshes in your scene, or objects in their scene being parented to objects in your scene).

As long as your stuff doesn't connect (I mean "connect" in a heirarchical or node-based way) with any of the reference's stuff, it should be fine to have as many references as you want.

If you do need to have stuff from the reference scene interacting/connecting with yours (or vice-versa), then you need to make sure that you know exactly who is working on what scene, what reference, what they are doing to it and when it will be committed.

If someone makes a major change in a scene that you're referencing and relying on, then you need to know what it is and how it will affect you.

As long as you keep on top of this, then you should be fine.

Basically there should not be many issues if, say, someone is modelling a single house and you're making a large scene using multiple copies of the house reference, as long as they have a "control group" transform node whose name never changes, containing all the stuff you need to move around. Since if you are referencing in and moving around houses from the other scene, if they change the name of the node that you've been editing, then the whole thing will fall apart. Similarly if they place another different node above it in the heirarchy then strange things may happen (or may not).

Basically you will need to keep a very tight rein on what is being edited in each referenced scene, and make sure no drastic name changes of important nodes take place.

If you're not editing anything in the referenced scenes (not even moving/rotating/scaling), then that is the ideal situation.

Thanks MoP. Good considerations you've provided here. We're using Subversion by the way for check-in/out.

We plan to do a test in January once our second location gets their Maya copies.

For now I tried to test:

model ref of -> anim ref of -> "master file"

The master file is the one we'll use to export an .fbx into Unity.

And it works fine (all modeling edits auto update as expected), except when I rigged and skinned the animated ref file and then adding geometry on the original model.

So what we'll probably do is get whoever's modelling to handle the rigging and animation too if needed for an individual part.

Might be worth looking into setting up a Maya MEL script to link into the "Reload Reference" command in the Ref Editor right-click menu, whereby it does an SVN Update on the referenced file through the command line, then reloads the reference - might save a bit of time if you're updating/refreshing a lot.