Material Help for Newbie

Graphics Shaders & Materials
1

Hi everybody!

I am very new to Unity and making my first steps, so to say. I’ve got a very general question about Unity and materials.

I am working with Blender and import models by dragging and dropping it in the Project tab. Once the model has been imported, Unity automatically creates a folder for the model and a folder for the material(s). The problem is, however that even though the material and model are in the project, the model does not have any colour - I guess that texture must be imported separately.

I then import the texture and assign it to the Material, which was autogenerated by Unity, upon the 3D model import. The problem is however, one I do all that, I cannot find a slot/tab/section in the 3D model to “plug” that material into and the only way of giving that 3D model the colour I want is to create a new Prefab/Game Object and assign the texture to that directly.

Now… that works, but it seems like such a waste of, well material, which was created by Unity, since all that I am using in the scene is the 3D model (inside a game object/prefab) and the texture assigned directly to it.

Am I missing something? Am I doing the right thing?

I have used UE2 and UDK beforehand, and am pretty decent with UDK, the materials, etc ,etc and this seems very weird to me.

Thanks a lot!

2

In general, if you modify the model as little as possible once it’s in unity (e.g. by modifying the automatically assigned material rather than assigning a new material) then further updates will be smooth.

E.g. you have a model with several materials assigned. You import to Unity and the materials are “there” but all wrong. So you carefully fix the materials (but don’t assign new ones)… further changes (e.g. modifications of texture maps, geometry, UVs) should “just work”. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty solid.

Unity is smarter than it “promises” to be. E.g. if you break up a model, the individual pieces are still “linked” to the file by name (or something…) so if you change the model the pipeline will automatically update it. BUT if you rename a mesh in the model, or create a new mesh, then stuff starts to disappear.