Nope, nope nope nope. This keeps coming up again with "we just need the right tools".
The thing is there's a good chance the people you're working with aren't very technically inclined(which is why they're such awesome artists, they have other focuses). Anything more than the simplest scheme is going to fall over at production scale.
It's been tried many times, the tools that you are talking about(Maya, Photoshop, ZBrush, etc) don't even consider merging with their large binary workflows. The closest you get to this is referenced scenes in Maya and that requires a good technical artist to set everything up and police things so that people don't touch things they don't understand.
> Anything more than the simplest scheme is going to fall over at production scale.
Then we need a simpler scheme that still allows people to understand that two can work at the same time. Everyone hates merging regardless of their technical ability, even software developers, but I refuse to believe that it's a hopeless task to build a tool for merging artwork.
That's because merging two things is inherently complex. You need a complete understanding of both how they work and all the things they interact with. That's why everyone hates merging.
You're welcome to take a crack at it, however you're looking at hundreds of hours of work to reverse-engineer all the formats that Adobe and Autodesk use plus whatever new tools are on the horizon that you don't know about yet.
AFAIK there isn't a single tool out there that can render a PSD to PNG reliably(aside from scripted photoshop) so thinking we would be able to cover the entire suite of tools is a bit naive.
The thing is there's a good chance the people you're working with aren't very technically inclined(which is why they're such awesome artists, they have other focuses). Anything more than the simplest scheme is going to fall over at production scale.
It's been tried many times, the tools that you are talking about(Maya, Photoshop, ZBrush, etc) don't even consider merging with their large binary workflows. The closest you get to this is referenced scenes in Maya and that requires a good technical artist to set everything up and police things so that people don't touch things they don't understand.