SG Asset name vs Maya Asset file name discrepancy

[philip.scadding]

I’d recommend reading this for the underscore:

How do I convert white spaces in entity names to underscores and not hyphens during folder creation?

If an entity has white space characters in its name, by default Toolkit will replace these characters with hyphens when creating folders and files. It’s not uncommon for us to get asked if it’s possible to replace white space characters with underscores instead. To which the answer is yes it’s possible but not normally advisable. The reason for this is that we use the _ character as a separator between template keys. As an example, if we had ...{asset}_{task}... in a template path, and if …

As for your second question, @Jerome_Drese is mostly correct!
The templates are what Toolkit uses to figure out the path and name of a file.
These templates are referenced by the apps in the environment files.
For example, the tk-multi-workfiles2 app is the app that provides the save dialog and the template it uses to save a file when working on assets is defined here.

So as you can see we can use a different template for the save app depending on the engine and environment (Which you can think of as context), as there can be separate setting blocks defined for these. I’d recommend reading this guide for more info on how this works.

Beyond that, the {name} key in the template is looked out for by the workfiles app, and if it is present in the template, it will provide an input box in the save dialog for the user to enter a name.

If the {name} key is not present in the template, then it won’t show a name field in the dialog. If for example, you wanted the file to be always named after the asset, and not allow your user’s to input a name, then you could do:

‘@asset_root/work/maya/{asset_name}.v{version}.{maya_extension}’

Or if you wanted the Asset name and the user input:

‘@asset_root/work/maya/{asset_name}_{name}.v{version}.{maya_extension}’