When the Maya FBX plug-in discovers objects or elements that have the same name, a naming conflict occurs. The Maya FBX plug-in compensates for this by renaming the elements on import or export. The same is true for any upper- and lower-case conflicts.
This occurs when, for example, you export an FBX scene from 3ds Max that contains two objects named “Box01”. The result in Maya is that the first object called “Box01”, and the second object, originally called “Box01” as well, is now named “Box01_ncl1_1”. This must happen because Maya does not support objects with the same names.
The following is a description of what happens:
When the Maya FBX plug-in finds multiple instances of the same name in the scene, a symbolic code is used. The Maya FBX plug-in can read older files, although it no longer writes them this way.
The new suffix is then: _ncl1_x (where x is the instance number).
Sometimes when you import multiple FBX characters from 3ds Max into a game engine, conflicts occur that result in root joints fusing together. This is because some software packages do not require namespaces for objects to tell them apart, as Maya does. Therefore, when exporting to a game engine, it is essential to remove any namespaces.
3ds Max supports duplicated names, so export works automatically with the 3ds Max Export Selected option. However, duplicated names create issues in Maya and MotionBuilder, and so if you had 2 characters using the same rig name, you must use a different namespace for each rig.
When exporting two characters from Maya or MotionBuilder
When importing two characters that contain objects with the same names, such as a character rig
When the Maya FBX plug-in finds upper- and lower-case conflicts in the names of objects or elements in the scene, a more complex suffix is used to keep track of which character was/is upper- or lower-case so it can be converted back on import/merge.
The following suffixes are used to indicate the case:
| Situation | Suffix |
|---|---|
| Indicates case | _ncl2 |
| To depict characters that were originally upper case and have become lower case | _ulXXXX |
| To depict characters that were originally lower case and have become upper case | _luxxxx. (Where xxxx is a four-digit integer representing the character position in the string (bit-wise). For example, _ul5 indicates that the first and third characters in the string have been changed from upper to lower case. A suffix can be made of the combination of _ul and _lu sub-suffixes.) |