Any success on getting to the bottom of this ? I have been searching but there doesn’t seem to be much info. If they are all wrapped up in the scene swatch file, surely somebody has reverse engineered it over the years ?
I see people have written scripts that create swatch files for .ma or .mb files that may be imported shaders. One thing I must do is query the drag and drop of image from Renderview to hypershade, to see what happens when overriding default swatch, and what Maya is doing under the hood.