FBX Update Issues with Merge

Just thought I'd share an issue that's cropped up with the latest versions of the FBX plugins, from v2011.2 onwards.

In previous versions if you did an import and had the include set to 'Update scene elements' it would import onto nodes using a shortName match so that the path didn't get taken into account. This is NO LONGER the case, it now uses a full DAG path match.

Our main MoCap pipeline relies on the fact the we have data coming from MotionBuilder as such:

FBX_DATA_GameRoot
....>FBX_DATA_Root
........>FBX_DATA_Spine

But on our Maya binders we parent this hierarchy as we may need to scale the nodes to get a better remapping fit, so in Maya it looks like

ADJUSTER
....>FBX_DATA_GameRoot
........>FBX_DATA_Root
............>FBX_DATA_Spine

Now this has always worked, and it's been very successful, the animators just throw the fbx into the scene and they get a bound rig. But because it's now using a full dag path match the fbx will no longer bring any data in unless the entire paths match.

This is something that the FBX guys know about and hopefully will be resolved/roll-back to it's previous functionality soon.

UPDATE:

As of FBX version FBX 2011.3.1. the guys at Autodesk rolled the behaviour of this back to it's original, so nodes are updated based on node name NOT full Dag path. Thanks to Trevor Adams in the FBX team for this one.