Wrapping FBX or MA asset inside of a ScriptedImporter?

Is this possible?

We want to make a custom importer that leverages the existing FBX and MA functionality built into Unity. No sense repeating that work, but we want it embedded as a child of a larger top level importer using ScriptedImporter.

The reasoning here is we need to connect with a back end asset database rather than a file system, so we want the top level ScriptedImporter to handle the database queries, get the files and pass them to Unity. Once the MA/FBX is imported though we need to do additional processing to hook up texture data that won’t be included in the file, as well as custom components. This all seems easier to encompass as part of he importer rather than copying the MA/FBX over to Unity as a top level asset, and then requiring the artist to run additional steps to do all the hookup.

If this is possible does anyone know how I could go about doing it? I have done some basic work with ScriptedImporters with custom data formats, so I mostly understand how those work, I just can’t see how I would embed say an FBX asset in there without it showing up as its own top level asset as soon as it is copied to the project directory.

yes you can, start with these for research:

I’ve read through all of those more or less, but I still don’t see how I can embed the asset inside of my own top level asset. I have a hodgepodge setup working where the MA file is copied to a subfolder in the project and imported by Unity, then my importer grabs its sub assets and extracts the meshes out of it and puts a copy in itself, but this is not what I am going for I want, if possible, to essentially just call the Unity internal importer to do the import and return an object which I can then embed into my own asset with AssetImportContext.addSubAsset()