Exporting - How To Keep The Maya Namespace

[ColinKennedy]

I'm certain that there is (or used to be) a way in Maya to export USD Prims including the original Maya name but now that I'm trying to do it again, I'm forgetting the exact way. The output would be roughly

def SomeType "some_namespace_foo"
{
    custom string maya:name = "|some_namespace:foo"
}

The translator would convert : to _ but then the real unmodified DAG or DG path, including the namespace, is retained as an attribute. It wasn't called maya:name but it was some attribute like it.

Does anyone know the way to handle that? I'm checking around the export options but so far haven't found how that's done yet.

[santosd]

Hi @ColinKennedy , I know that in the UI for export MayaUSD has the option to include namespace on export however, what this does is it just takes the namesspace and adds it to the name of the defined prim. For example (mayaNamespace:spherePrim would become mayaNamespace_spherePrim. However, by default it does not save a custom attribute, however, this could potentially be possible with an import\export schema: https://github.com/Autodesk/maya-usd/blob/dev/lib/mayaUsd/fileio/doc/SchemaAPI_Import_Export_in_Python.md

[ColinKennedy]

So that I understand the suggestion, are you saying that I'd need to define a Schema object and then include its name in cmds.mayaUSDExport(..., apiSchema=["NameHere"], ...) and the schema would need basically return CanAdapt() == True for all DG / DAG nodes and then I suppose it'd define CopyToPrim? That seems like a viable way forward, thank you for the suggestion.

I think we've mostly written around the original need so I probably won't need to test this but since the idea is solid I will go ahead and "Mark as answer". I can always unmark or make a new question if we end up needing to come back to this.

Thank you for your suggestion!