Versionless publish

Flow Production Tracking
,
1

I’m exploring shotgun as an option for our studio’s asset management / pipeline.
However we heavily rely on referencing within our maya workflow, and the default setup for shotgun which is to publish files with version numbers, is incompatible with this approach.

In short I would like to have a versioned working file, and a versionless publish file. That way when a publish updates, you don’t need to open every scene using it to update the location to the latest version.
NIM accomplishes this by creating a symlink to the latest publish version
Our existing custom pipeline uses a similar setup.
I’ve gone through the tutorials using tk-multipublish2 and created my own publish plugin that will create a versionless file, however a second run of the publish clashes with the existing file, and much of the logic is abstracted behind the parent classes.
Even with the first successful publish, (which shows up in the SG site for appropriate asset/task), that file doesn’t show up in the File Open dialog within maya.
Clearly the SG api’s are a very extensive, but is it possible to implement this through the multi-publish plugin approach? Or do I need to ignore these tools, and write my own implementation strictly using sgtk and discard the shotgun integrations?

This post from 2015 looks like the same ask since this is a very common approach, but it never got any answers.

Thanks for any advice.

2

For those also wondering about this approach, I’ve implemented my own publish plugin through the multi-publish2 interface, relying on custom data within the maya session to solve it.

The publish of records to shotgun first searches for a match, and if found updates the version column of the record, then overwrites the file on disk.
If the record doesn’t exist it makes it.
The version however is not part of the name as defined in the template.
I also use the version info to make a versioned copy alongside the versionless one.
I don’t track the versioned file in shotgun as of now, simply so the Shotgun > File Load UI is easier to read, and remains less cluttered. This other post of mine shows more of the thought process.