Fbx Scene Import - Not showing all materials

Development Rendering
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1

When I import my model via scene import, not all the materials are showing in the materials tab. To demonstrate this, I can choose the option to replace all of the materials with a single, bright red material. When I import, there are still multiple parts of the model that have differing materials (they should in theory all be red).

I’d be happy to send the model to someone but I can’t post it publicly.

2

First of all, for proper workflow you would want to import textures manually and create materials for them manually.
Second, if you have loads of materials on one mesh, it means the mesh gets redrawn for each additional material it has and thats bad practice.

Best to import everything separately, and set up one master material in which you can change the textures and additional settings in a material instance for all mesh.

3

I’m in agreement with Luos here with material handling.

With regards to the specific issue you’ve called out about import not assigning all the materials the selected base material name. When I use a car asset off TF3DM.com that I know would have a lot of material assignments (20 in the Audi R8 that I downloaded) works correctly.

If this is only happening with your asset, it would probably be best to post it here or share it privately as part of the investigation into this, or list any specific repro steps you know that can reliably reproduce the issue from a newly created asset.

Thank you!

Tim

4

Hi Tim, I am indeed using the workflow that Luos suggests, however this behaviour means that upon reimport, some material assignments are being lost - the root of the problem is the import itself isn’t assigning them in the first place. In any case, i’ve sent you the file for testing. I apologise in advance for the tediousness of one of the steps!

  1. Create a new project and “Import into Level” the file provided. Leave the settings as they are and import.
  2. Right click on the Fbx Scene Import Data and reimport. Go to the materials tab and have all of the materials be overridden by a single material. In my case I just chose the first one which was called “base_material”. Press reimport.
  3. Note that some sections of the model aren’t using this material. Logically, if you just overwrote all of the materials with “base_material”, this implies that some of the materials are being skipped or not shown in the materials tab.
5

Thanks for sending the mesh. What I’m seeing here isn’t so much a bug as a workflow and naming issue.

The fence on the backside that has the worldgrid material assigned doesn’t have a set material when I check it in 3DS Max. Also, when importing the FBX into the scene there are a lot of warnings about the material names and that using the reimport option will likely cause issues, even though I didn’t see anything that stood out. With all the meshes there is a total of 141 materials that I counted. Also, several materials included warnings about characters that are no accepted in UE4 to which these were renamed.

6

To be honest, I’d say the “Found material name clash…” is in fact a bug. The material name is intentional, and they are referring to the same material so no renaming should be taking place!

Even after resolving the invalid character error, there’s an abundant amount of materials that aren’t listed in the materials tab (i’ll send you a new FBX).

7

Actually, there are multiple materials in the FBX file itself which is really quite annoying. Perhaps there could be a setting on how the importer treats multiple materials with the same name? (Make Unique, Merge).