Many moons ago, I did some contract work for the now non-existent Maxis team over in Emeryville, California (not to be confused with the Maxis team in Redwood Shores that works on the Sims).

We had an issue with a lot of copy and pasted assets in Maya – as it happens that Maya absolutely loves to append ‘pasted__’ into the namespace of transforms, mesh shapes and almost every node that ends up being pasted into the Maya scene. While Maya has the ability to search and replace names on transforms and mesh shapes in the Maya scene, it did not and still does not have the ability to clean up the hypershade nodes – which can lead to fairly unreadable hypershade, as at some point you’ll have scenes with material names similar to ‘pasted__pasted__pasted__blinn3’.

One of the artists made a script that removed ‘pasted__’ from the material names, but unfortunately only removed the first instance. While I never ended up looking at the script at the time, I imagine he simply wrote something to check the first x characters and remove if it matched. This lead artists into having to run a few times to clean up the hypershade.

When I eventually worked at Telltale, I noticed the art team had similar issues, except it was much worse as the production times for each episode of the game were very short, and a lot of copy and pasting was used – either through the standard Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V or through a custom import script.

I ended up writing the below script to catch all instances of a defined set of characters via regex – as I did not want artists to have to click on buttons multiple times.

# Author : Farhan Noor 7/13/2015
# Hypershade Cleanup
import pymel.core as pm
import re


def renameHypershadeNodes(hypRemove, hypReplace):
    
    hypSelection = pm.ls(type='shadingEngine', mat=True)
    print hypSelection
    for shadeNode in hypSelection:
        if re.search(hypRemove, str(shadeNode.name())):
            print (("Renaming %s to %s") % (
                shadeNode.name(), shadeNode.name().replace(hypRemove, hypReplace)))
            shadeNode.rename(shadeNode.name().replace(hypRemove, hypReplace))

renameHypershadeNodes("pasted__", "")

Note that we did not care about the file texture nodes – only the materials themselves as the names were baked into the mesh export, so this doesn’t really look at any other nodes. You can easily adjust the file texture nodes by adjusting to look for type=’ftn’.