FBX to UDK

[Anonymous]

I've nearly finished establishing a proper FBX to UDK (Unreal Development Kit) pipeline that allows us to effectively assign materials, behaviors, etc but I have one last hitch: node (?) naming. I'm very new to the FBX SDK but if absolutely necessary, I'll learn the SDK and cook up a converter to help with this (although I hope it won't be necessary).

The problem is when importing FBX into UDK, you have a couple of options:
1) Isolate common objects (i.e., interior walls) in authoring software and export to FBX; in UDK select combine meshes. However, with many shapes and configurations, the collision and texture application is... unreliable, leaving us to have to recreate the meshes inside of UDK. That's too much time.
2) Import every object independently, place one by one into UDK. I've written a little app that attempts to place the objects as they were in the original software and works reliably except most of the object names created by the exporter contain characters illegal inside of UDK (e.g., Wall Generic - 8" ).

Any tips on reconfiguring/redefining the naming? Otherwise, the next step in option 2 is to rename each and every object... hundreds or thousands of them.

Thanks

[Anonymous]

hello XeroPhane,

I sent your question to our lead developer and here is what he said:

"The best solution to resolve the naming problems is to implement your own version of the renaming strategy class (if the ones already available in the FBXSDK are not enough to meet your needs). You can have a look at the classes KFbxRenamingStrategy and KFbxSceneRenamer. We already do this with the Maya plug-in since, as we all know, Maya does not allow any non-alphanumeric characters (except the : and the _) but because they have special meaning they cannot be allowed. The renaming strategy for Maya will replace any non-alphanumeric character with the special string: FBXASC###, where ### is the character code. Sure this will create longer, and somewhat encrypted names, but it will also prevent any confusion and duplications. Anyway, the best way for you is to play with the above mentioned classes and see if they can suits your needs."

Hope this helps,
Cheers!
Carlos