Hi everyone,
I’m working with the AYON Hiero addon and I’m trying to understand how other studios are handling multi-representation publishing in Hiero.
I’m specifically interested in workflows where a single plate publish needs to carry multiple derived outputs, for example:
From a single source plate (bg01), I often need to publish:
- main plate → full res EXR (for CG / pipeline)
- review → lightweight movie (dailies / editorial approval)
- proxy / half-res EXR → lighter working plates for CG
- sometimes additional variants (jpegs, alternate resolutions, etc.)
So essentially:
one source → multiple representations → same version
In previous setups, I worked with a very simple and flexible folder logic like:
{extension}{resolution}
This gave a very scalable structure because it naturally covered most needs and made it very easy to extend without touching core publish logic.
What I’m running into in AYON Hiero addon is that there are two main limitations:
Folder / structure limitation
It seems that AYON relies on a fixed representation-driven folder structure meaning. Folder separation is tied to representation names and it’s not easily extensible beyond what is explicitly defined in extractors. This makes it harder to introduce additional logical “layers” like resolution grouping, format grouping, or arbitrary extra outputs (utility / proxy / etc.)
without duplicating logic or creating multiple publish types.
UI limitation in Hiero publisher
The Hiero creator UI is currently limited to:
- main plate selection
- review track selection
Which effectively means that only those 2 will be “attached together” per publish
So adding things like: proxy EXR, half-res plates, additional outputs, doesn’t scale cleanly inside the UI itself.
One workaround would be splitting into multiple publishes, but that would be very problematic because:
- it breaks atomicity (same plate becomes multiple publishes)
- versioning becomes harder to track consistently
- introduces risk of mismatch between representations
- editorial intent is lost (it’s still one plate logically)
- the amount of plates per shot will visually grow and be messy on a file system context and tracker
In reality, all of these outputs belong to the same logical source, they are just different representations.
I’m curious how others are solving this in production, my concrete questions to the community are:
-How are you handling more than 2 representations in Hiero publishes?
-Do you extend the Hiero addon UI?
-Is there a recommended “AYON way” to scale beyond review + main without fragmenting publishes?
Would really appreciate any insights or examples from production setups.
Thanks a lot!