Assets with unicode character paths not supported on render nodes (only extended ASCII supported)

[davidkydd]

MayaIO2017 still complains about the path containing unrecognized characters and refuses to render the affected textures. Tested both on Centos and Windows "Error: line 1: This file contains data that cannot be converted to the encoding of the current locale. If file is saved data loss will occur."

[annatisch]

@davidkydd - Does this include paths with only characters from extended ASCII? Or does the file have other Unicode characters (like Japanese/Chinese characters).

The former scenario shouldn't error - at least not on Windows (Linux still seems a buggy here).

[davidkydd]

@annatisch this was observed with Japanese characters in the path

[annatisch]

@davidkydd - ah, in that case we should simply document that this will never be supported, as Maya will not support it. We need to get images published with the Japanese edition.

It might be worth doing some investigation as to whether we can alert people to this in the plugin..... even if it's as simple a check as: "If customer is using Japanese edition locally, display a warning if they use the standard edition in the cloud environment".

[davidkydd]

@annatisch I'm not sure that we should document this as never to be supported - as it will likely be supported once we have images published with the Japanese and Chinese editions of MayaIO. The intention was to create this issue as documentation, which we can close once we have published these new images.

The mitigation you suggest of detecting and alerting on this in the plugin is a good idea for the interim.

[annatisch]

@davidkydd - sorry I didn't mean "never supported" as in we would never offer the correct versions of Maya to accommodate these characters. Rather that standard Maya will never support this, so we should document that, and make sure that people are aware that if they use these characters they will need to wait until the correct images are available.