I have a set of models in .max 2010 format, using a biped based animation, which I need to import into unity, whenever I drop them in the scene the main colour defaults to black, which means the model appears black in both scene and game view.
I can solve this by going though and manually setting the main colours for the textures to white, but I’d like to know if there’s a way to change the default setting so this doesn’t happen in the future.
Simply apply a material in 3DS Max with a diffuse colour of whatever you like. When the model imports into Unity (via the inbuilt FBX) a material will be created with that colour. Likewise if you assign a texture from your Unity project directory, to your models in 3DS Max, those will also be applied to your imported unity models.
If instead you proceed to set up your material in Unity with textures and a shader allocation etc. then that will effectively become your master material and as long as you re-import your models (exported with the same file name and material) it should match up with your Unity material.
Otherwise it will simply create a new material each time you have a different file name/material, but that should still match your Max material colour, until you set that one up properly in Unity, for further info see the material import section here:
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/class-Mesh.html
Olly