Material assignments on models not propagating to other machines

I'm trying to understand Unity's rules for importing models (.FBX) and materials. Any insights would be appreciated.

The artists on my team will export .fbx files from Max and import them into Unity. Now, I understand Unity has some default rules for how it expects textures to be named so that it can find them on import, and that if it can't find the textures it autogenerates blank materials. When this happens the artists will manually set up the appropriate materials and assign them by hand. Once they are done they check their work into our ESC, inclulding all meta files.

The problem arises when other people sync to those changes and load Unity. The models will get 'imported' again, Unity will autogenerate another set of blank materials and the materials assigned to the models will be wrong. Clearly, requiring every person on the team to hand-setup materials for every model is not acceptable, and wouldn't work for creating clean automated builds anyway.

So, my question is this: Why is Unity creating all these autogenerated materials despite the fact that the artists have already set up the models/materials/textures and everything is checked in, and what do we have to do get it to work right?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Russ Glaeser
Development Manager
Cascade Game Foundry

 

I'm still looking for a solution to this problem if anyone has any ideas.

Russ Glaeser
Development Manager
Cascade Game Foundry