Newbie here.
I just spent two hours struggling with the UI because I couldn’t figure out why my FBX imported as a Material Instance instead of a Master Material. While I understand this is now a ‘feature’ for performance, the new FBXLegacyPhongSurfaceMaterial is a nightmare for newcomers. It breaks almost every existing tutorial and isn’t intuitive at all.
@UE_FlavienP I know the intention is good, but it’s overwhelming to import a FBX file for the first time and not be able to figure out how to change even the basic color. At the very least, there should be a clear option to use the legacy import workflow instead of updating some mysterious string in an unknown ini file.
my two cents, so i’m following a tutorial where we create assets in blender, texture them in substance painter, then use them in ue. The tutorial was using material and not material instance so i found this post. Turns out i could simply delete the material instance, and create a brand new material and assign it to my asset.
Not a big deal in the end, but yeah, a working “import as material/material instance” choice would be nice i guess.
As a general question, when importing gltf models specifically using the “import into level”/”as scene”, unreal doesn’t generate instances but instead generates plain materials, and there is no setting in that import pipeline to affect that. Is that the intended behaviour?
And when importing an fbx, trying to manually set up the instances to use a different master material than the fbx phong legacy one, int the import dialog, unreal seems to fully igonore that?
Which version of the engine are you using? I cannot reproduce your behaviour when importing a gltf into a level => it generates instance materials and that is the expected behaviour.
Can you show me what you see in the pipelines at the top of your import dialog when your do your gltf import into level.
For FBX import not using the material instance settings is a bug we are aware of.
Same for when importing an fbx after changing the ConvertorDefaultPipeline and/or the DefaultMaterialPipeline in the project settings to a custom pipeline. It still uses the default ones (UE 5.7.3).
Also noticed, identifying duplicate materials works (it doesn’t create new materials) but it still imports the textures of the duplicate materials.
Wow. Super unfortunate that it now works this way. Can you provide more info on how to edit the ini file to fix this issue? You’ve explained the part of the file to edit, but where is the one you’re talking about? Also, is there any chance the feature will return someday? I mostly do low poly games with small textures, and them all being cluttered up as instances is making simple things take much longer.