Any advice about workflow for very large scenes that use the asset browser?

Question

I have taken on a project that will require a rather large overall scene and I would now like to game out how I will combine everything. Here are my typical steps/workflow:

I have built out multiple blend files with each discrete item (and its set dressing elements). Any mesh/item that will be used more than once is instanced from the Asset Browser in the following manner:

In a collection called INSTANCES (disabled from current view layer), I create a subfolder with the title of the asset. I then import my mesh from the asset library as a LINK. This places it at the world center. I then move the imported mesh into the new folder (which is, again, hidden from the view layer).

Then, in my set dressing collection, I add the collection to my scene as an instance and orient/size and repeat as needed. In this way, I ensure that all asset-based meshes always come from the asset browser.

But now that I have multiple blend files with multiple instanced assets, I have run into problems. Mainly that now I can't link a separate blend because that assumes a .blend file that isn't filled with hidden collections (as those render out automatically).

My main question is this: Is it wiser to build one really large blend file (with all my instanced asset browser references) and just hide the parts I'm not working on? Or is there a workflow that would allow me to break up my work like this?

I'm sure I'm not the only person who deals with this, but I haven't stumbled across the correct concoction of keywords to find my way. Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Answer 1

Is it wiser to build one really large blend file (with all my instanced asset browser references) and just hide the parts I'm not working on? Or is there a workflow that would allow me to break up my work like this?. As of right now I would recommend actually building everything in one really large blend file. The reason why I recommend this however is because of technichal nature, which is stability and speed. Because the asset browser is a rather new addition to Blender it is rather bug ridden, meaning that especially if you have large scene unexpected behaviour can occur, for which tracing down the source of the problem would also be difficult. Another concern is speed. Because of the aforementioned bugs apparently using asset browser asset may slow down your viewport significantly faster than usual, although I haven't experienced them firsthand. Of course the Blender developers are constantly fixing these problems, howver this means that to have a flawless asset browser workflow it's probably advisable to update your Blender version regurlarly. So generally as of now I would recommend building one large blend file, unless ther is a very specific reason not to do so.