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Hi guys, i might be asking a complete noob question here (i'm a beginner with Houdini...) so i'm sry if this is totally rtfm. I'm the pipeline TD of a project (this one ) and we are running a Houdini/Maya pipeline. Our pipeline is asset based which means that artists are doing chunks of work with well defined in/output (a shading hda for example, or a maya rig) and then publish this work either into an HDA or just copying a maya file to where all references are pointing to. (Publishing in fancy TD speech) These assets are then used by other artists (for example an animator might reference a rig to do his animation, or a lighting artists brings in the shading HDA from the Shading OTL and apply it to a prop in the shot). So it's important that the artists coming later on are able to change stuff specific to a shot on the base asset. They need to make local edits, while still remaining the *live connection* to the global changes that are made on the base assets, which are ment to ripple through the whole production. How is that happening in Maya: Maya stores local changes to references as MEL script automatically. The *live connection* to the reference always remains, and local changes are layered on top. This way you always have the latest & greatest global version + your local edits. (As long as you dont break on what the scripts rely on....names) What is the way to achieve that in Houdini? As far as i understand, when you want to make local edits to an asset, you say "Allow editing of contents". What that does is, it breaks the connection to your global asset and uses a scene embedded definition instead, where you are doing your local edits. You can then either choose to publish your local changes globally into the otl again or match the global definition back to your local asset (loosing your local changes). Once again, i might be totally newb here and overcomplicating things, but i'm wondering about the Houdini way to enable people to do local edits on assets while staying live to global changes? (Since we always relied upon exactly that with the assets/references in Maya). PS: Maybe that's all a bit theoretical so let me try to illustrate this with a totaly figured example: Lets say we have a very highpoly prop to populate a shot. It is most of the time entirely in the frame but we have one artists that is rendering a close up shot where only 10% of the prop are visible. In order to save translation time he deletes the 90% of polies that are invisible. (We now has a blast node between the UVGenerate and the OUT node). To be able to do that he clicked "Allow editing of contents", embedding the HDA into the scene. Later on the guy in charge of the base asset changes something on the UVs. He puts a UVPreGenerateFix node in front of the UVGenerate node in the HDA and publishes it. Everybody gets the new assets now, just not the guy who clicked "Allow editing of contents" and modified the HDA. In Maya the global and local changes would have been preserved since after referencing, the MEL scripts would have serached for a node called "UVGenerate" and a node called "OUT" and connected the local blast node inbetween.