Copy materials when importing assets

[Coppel.Damien]

Hello,

I am facing an recurring issue when importing new assets. There is only two option or importing assets with materials whose names already exists in the project: Delete previous ones by overwriting, or use already existing ones.

Both option can damage my project. I have lost multiple hours changing names of materials myself to avoid these problems. I think an option that copies materials on import is mandatory. Do you plan to release such an option in the next release ?

[silent]

Hi Damien,

When preparing content in DCC tools it's important to think which materials can be reused later to save some performance and share as much materials across different objects as possible.

If you 100% sure that you will not reuse material you need to create a unique name for that.

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We are thinking of adding an option to assign model file name as prefix to the material name, so in that case you will also need to make sure that file names are different here.

For example, if you have FBX files named box_1.fbx and box_2.fbx with material name material you will get the following material names after import: box_1_material.mat and box_2_material.mat.

So if you will rename FBX file and reimport you may have bad times (as always when you are tied to a file name instead of some kind of GUID).

If that will be enough for your use-case we can try to make these changes prior to 2.14 relese.

Thanks!

[Coppel.Damien]

That would be very useful, yes !
I'm using fbx models downloaded from CAD websites and they often have generic mats names like "glass.mat" etc... Which results in deletion of materials or wrong material used with the current options. Ideally I would like every fbx model to have its own "materials" folder with all the mats it uses (so it's independent from the rest of the project).

I think your solution would solve my problem, thank you !