Parks wants winterized fountain-surround instances hidden for the season without rewriting the surround prototype mesh. What should they do?

Parks can hide fountain-surround instances for winter while keeping the surround prototype ready for spring. The appropriate approach is to hide the seasonal instance set through pointInstancer visibility or inactive instance masks. This makes winterization a time-bound population edit: the plaza scene remains structured, the prototype mesh stays unchanged, and spring reopening requires clearing the mask rather than restoring geometry from backup. Scaling every surround prototype to zero in the shared asset file is a destructive global workaround: it affects every park using that asset, can confuse bounds and extent tools, and does not express visibility cleanly. Exporting the plaza to glTF and permanently removing the winterized surround nodes from the scene archive turns a seasonal hide into permanent removal, leaves the USD twin unchanged, and disrupts round-trip municipal workflows. Specializing the surrounds under a weaker arc misuses composition strength; specialization and weaker opinions are not suitable for seasonal instance visibility, and a weaker arc may not remove stronger authored geometry as intended. Exam caveat: keep seasonal hides in a dated or seasonal layer with clear ownership, not in the catalog prototype; editing a shared prototype for a temporary municipal condition misses technical and governance expectations. Practical check: enable the winter layer and confirm the surrounds disappear, disable it and confirm they return, verify the prototype file’s content is unchanged, and ensure plazas sharing that prototype are unaffected.