Names with special characters does not export correctly from 3dsmax through datasmith

Development Pipeline & Plugins
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1

Hi,

Names with special characters like “Box002/*@$%?&><” are exported using the 3dsmax plugin to “Box002__________”
Using plugin 4.22E1 and ue4 4.22.2 and 3dsmax 2016

Was working fine before and tested working on plugin 4.19.18.3 with UE4 4.19.2

It is really problematic as we were building a workflow using some special characters to identify/filter objects…

I did submit a bug for it

2

things changed in the core of unreal since then for various reasons that won’t allow us to change this easily

for filtering, i suggest you start exploring metadata via user defined properties or tags, which are also exported from 3ds max. this will be more reliable

3

Thank you for the feedback pierre-felix,

in fact i did check renaming assets in content browser and all special characters are not allowed in 4.22, aside from “-” and “_”…that is pretty big changes!
Out of curiosity is it for performance reasons? Any hope that one or two additional special characters could be supported?

I see in the .udatasmith file that special characters are replaced with “_” does that means that we could not have access to the full original names of all objects if we wanted to script some operations with Python in the import process?

I will look into user prefs but that will be more involving than having a simple character in the file name :slight_smile:

4

Hi,

Some reasons have to do with how closely assets and objects are named with regards to path on disk. When you factor in multi platform, then additional constraints appear.

I did a quick test and meta data do carry over correctly those characters:

If you could give more details of what you are trying to do, maybe we can find an easy solutions.

For example, this maxscript will add the object name as a user defined property for all max objects - if that is helpful at all:

for obj in $objects do
(
    setUserProp obj "OriginalMaxObjectName" (obj.name) 
)

Worth mentioning, we do track unique 3ds max IDS as well and they are exported as actor tags:

I don’t know if that is what you are looking for or not since I don’t quite know what you are trying to accomplish.