I’m looking for a good way to inject metadata into an FBX file on its way to Unreal, and then to pull that data out on the unreal side.
Right now I do this in the most brute-force way possible; I stash a blob of JSON, crunched down to a string with base64 encoding, onto a string attribute on the root node of the maya file. This works fine, but I feel like it’s very crude – in particular I don’t like the fact that unreal has to scan lots of nodes looking for my metadata and I’m worried that some artist will find a way to cut-and-paste objects such that Unreal gets two, conflicting copies of the data.
So I’m looking for a suggestion about the right place to inject file-level metadata into an fbx and then to pull it out in unreal. My instinct is to use vanilla fbx to export the file and then post-edit it right after it’s complete to add the data from Maya – though an alternative would be to write a custom FBX plugin with more flexibility. I assume the latter is more work but I could be wrong.
Suggestions? @Randall_Hess?