Survey: Material Import Default for Unity

I'd love to see an additional option where one can assign default materials manually to the importer, like the default options in Scripts and Shaders.

Not sure how, or even if this is possible, but it would be fantastic.

Neither of the poll options actually work flawlessly in my studio's work flow (I still voted for Material Names though ), so we have a asset preprocessor script that just turns material generation off completely! If we leave the import option on, invariably we have masses of unused auto generated materials that are never used by anything, which makes commits to our repository very messy.

My 2 cents

 

Echoing Wahooney's statement

Material name is the more useful default for us, but we're also overriding the import process to avoid the material spam situation.

We have an asset pre-processor to step in before a material is actually created and saved, with a user prompt to create the material.
If you click no it assigns a default "Missing Material" to the object.

Mainly this is to encourage naming conventions ( used in our atlasing ) and also to maintain clean source files as well as keep a handle on how many materials are created unnecessarily.

 

Would prefer current as that way I can just assign my texture in the 3d app and it just works.

Having to name materials in ever small model file for a piece a background art would be a waste of time. If I set up one thing I.r.t the material/texture, that is to assign the main texture so I can UV map it

 

Material Naming would be best, because most of my textures has _diffuse, _normal and other suffixes, and I have to ALWAYS change this to material naming, remove created crap and reimport. It drives me nuts! Thanks for the pool!

 

+1

 

About a year ago, I started thinking "From Model's Material" would be best and changed all my model import settings accordingly.

But this caused more problems that it solved for me:

- In models, I usually want to name materials conveniently. For example, just "wood" or "leaves" if the model uses just one type of wood or leaf. Thus, a set of 4 different trees would all have colliding material names

- If I tried to use globally unique material names: "CherryBark," "AppleBark," "OakBark," I would not notice any accidental collisions. Unity would just silently reuse the existing material and my modeling tool would not show it either. Having a texture name collision immediately shows because I would be asked whether I want to overwrite the file when I copy the assets together.

I'm now thinking of switching everything back to "From Base Texture"

Maybe a project-wide default for new assets would be best. When you decide on a non-standard setting anywhere, you currently have to go through all models in a project and click the same boxes over and over...

 

That sucks. . .I lost what I was typing. I'll try to be brief this time.

I should mention that I may not know the particulars of Unity well enough at this time to provide useful feedback to the original questions. However, I have a few comments that I'd like to make:

1. I like to name my materials.

2. Unity keeps creating materials even after I delete them, and recreate and reassign it to the different objects.

3. A structured system is always better.

I understand the point of trying to prevent duplicate materials/textures/shaders from being uploaded to the graphics card or consuming system resources, but I prefer the responsibility to be on the developers/artists. Maybe I'm missing what's being stated here, but I'd rather have a tool that notes where the same texture names/materials are being used instead of something that is trying to maintain a global space.

 

I think that should be in the preferences! Because every single model I save I'll need to change, and the materials will be generated anyway, I want to use "From Model's Material" and "Project-Wide"!

 

Houdini has a nice feature, where you can right-click on an attribute and select "Set as Default".

It would be real nice if we could do this in Unity with importer options.

However, artists need to be forcibly educated that materials SHOULD BE NAMED.

There is nothing in the universe worse, when working with other people, than receiving a max or maya file with a hundred materials called Map #1, Map #2, Map #231...etc...



So Option 2.

 

I create stuff with the model name and Mat at the end and import right, fbx always goes with the characteristics of maya 2014, and with the texture in Unity 4.5.1f3 free

 

If I select "from Model´s Material" I still get the naming from the base texture"

this is ridiculous

 

Something that's been nagging me the past couple days, is having multiple types of imported object which all have different requirements for import settings.

What I think would be a most elegant solution, is to have the folder that the models/data are being imported to, contain the default/override settings, which apply to everything inside that folder. Subfolders inherit the parent folder's settings, but can have their own local overrides on top of this.

Because folders can contain anything, and you need a way to identify the contents of the folder to map settings to, perhaps the ability to add a new type of component to folders would be useful. This way we could have a Sprite Settings Override component, an FBX Settings Override component, an Audio override component, and so forth.

 

This still is an annoying option that needs addressing.
We can write a script that will effect all new fbx imported to adopt the "materialNaming" to from Models Material
But if the project is reimported this will effect all existing assets. Meaning its most likely a lot of assets would need to be re exported from 3dsmax
What would be great is if there was an option in project settings that allowed to switch this to default across whole project.

 

whats the status of this? is there a preference option somewhere?

 

Is this still being considered now that this thread is nearly 4 years old? Every time I bring in a new fbx I have to change it to import by material name, then go through and delete all the incorrect material names.

 

*coincidetial bump* and also paging @willgoldstone
Yes I was just wondering the same thing.
Even better than the standard being one or the other - could Unity please have a default setting for import naming conventions of new items?
A good example for me would be Allegorithmic with their export settings. Give us the option to set the convention ourselves. Maybe even in a dedicated folder that is not just based upon a recursive search (always search textures here [folder] - always create new materials here [folder])