Since 2017.3, Unity handles the import of materials from FBX differently. Materials are now - by default - embedded in the FBX and not editable from within Unity.
Has anyone from UT explained the rationale for this?
It seems to me that the only scenario in which this makes sense for an artist is where you have a 1:1 parity of the material systems between Unity and your modelling package. Meaning, you could set all parameters including shader and render queue from within your modelling app. And even then, that’s a roundabout way of doing things (it’s faster to make adjustments in Unity itself).
But as far as I can tell, no current 3D modelling package has this capability. Mine certainly doesn’t. In which case, making imported materials behave like this creates trouble and confusion for everyone.
Sure, I can manually create a material and apply it. But that wouldn’t stick as default, meaning I’d have to apply the material to every instance of the model, or forcing me to abstract everything further with prefabs. Most of all, this system is adding drastically to the number of clicks I have to perform to do basic things.
Does the marking of the old method as “legacy” mean it’ll be deprecated at some point and we’ll have no way to import materials that are editable?
It’d be nice with some word from UT on this, and maybe also an update of the materials FAQ.