MR Assmeblies and Passes

I didn't make it in time for the challenge (bummer ><) but I'm continuing work on this Dream Office project. As I add more stuff, I started running into memory problems, which is to be expected, no biggie. I've used mip_binaryproxies before and didn't have any issues, so I figured I'd give assemblies a shot, it doesn't hurt to learn, right? Wow! what a pain in the ass they've been so far!

So I'm trying to continue prancing merrily along, getting geared up to see my test renders, the image pops up and my proxies are sitting pretty with all the shaders of the original mesh, just delicious. I pull up my passes and the show just stops! The proxies weren't showing in the AO and zDepth passes, not even a little bit, I was getting black silhouettes where the geometry should be. I felt my shoulders slump. I'm running out of virgins and goats Maya!  I've never used assemblies before so there was a moment of total confusion when I thought that it was just too strange and maybe it's supposed to happen.  But then why would the objects turn up just fine in reflection passes etc?

I went ahead and created a simple scene to test the issue.

After toiling away and bouncing my troubles off a couple people, I figured something went wrong at the high res export stage. Apparently, exporting the .mi file with material assignment options checked is what caused the problem. 

I had to resort to the mip_binaryproxy workflow when it comes to assigning shaders, which is pretty much assigning the shaders to the low res object in the same order their tabs are listed in the attribute editor on the high res mesh, so yay for that.

I don't know why this happend, maybe I'll fiddle with it some more when I'm not so annoyed.