In Softimage, a standin object is the polygon mesh, hair, or point cloud with the Arnold_Standin property.

If you apply a material to a standin, that material will override any materials specified in the ASS file referenced by the standin. If you don’t want that to happen, give your material a name that starts with “Scene_Material” or “Standin_Material” (it doesn’t matter if you use uppercase or lowercase for the names).

If you do that, the standin object will use that material, but the objects in the ASS file will use the materials saved in the ASS file.

Here’s what you get in an exported ASS file. If SItoA finds a standin with a material name that starts with “scene_material” or “standin_material”, it exports a procedural node with no material.

procedural
{
 name standin-cube.SItoA.41000
 dso "\\server\project\Arnold_Scenes\XSI_Man.ass"
 min -4 0 -4
 max 4 0 4
 matrix 
  1 0 0 0
  0 1 0 0
  0 0 1 0
  0 0 0 1 
}

Otherwise, if you name the standin material something else, the procedural node will include a shader node for that material:

procedural
{
 name standin-cube.SItoA.41000
 dso "\\server\project\Arnold_Scenes\XSI_Man.ass"
 min -4 0 -4
 max 4 0 4
 matrix 
  1 0 0 0
  0 1 0 0
  0 0 1 0
  0 0 0 1 
 shader "Sources.Materials.DefaultLib.Test.standard.SItoA.40000.1" 
 declare procedural_shader constant ARRAY NODE
 procedural_shader "Sources.Materials.DefaultLib.Test.standard.SItoA.40000.1" 
}