Separating animation clips and model, incremental export

We are switching to a Maya workflow where we have a single animation per Maya scene. The anim scene references a rigged model scene.

I need to modify our open source Maya2glTF exporter to support this.

Artists would export the model first to glTF, and each animation clip to another gLTF that doesn't contain the model. The latter would be an invalid glTF, unless it refers to the model somehow.

Then at runtime we need to load all these glTFs as if they formed a single one.

This allows incremental work by multiple people (we have multiple animators working on different animations for a single character in parallel)

As far as I understand the spec, this is not supported by glTF 2.0

What approaches do you recommend for this?

Thanks!

Start by reviewing the glTF 2.0 specification and the Maya2glTF exporter mentioned in the issue, focusing on whether animation-only assets can reference a separately exported model. Define a supported approach for combining the model glTF and multiple animation glTFs at runtime; the issue does not name specific files or tests.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.