I’d really love to be able to import my meshes saved in another format than FBX. I suggest Collada (.dae) because material information is saved in Collada. So recreation of materials wouldn’t be necessary any more.
FBX supports importing materials and we do import them assuming you have the import material setting checked. Is that your only reason for wanting collada? Note that there really isn’t robust support for exporting physically based materials (which Unreal uses) from any popular dcc tool so collada wont really help you much more than fbx there.
Collada is an open source project started by the Khronos group when Autodesk bought Alias (Maya) which in turn bought the technology from Kaydara the developer of MotionBuilder who open licensed the use of FBX (FilmBoX), which is the native file format used by MotionBuilder.
The fear and reason Collada project was started was due to the fear at the time was AutoDesk would close source FBX laving a gap as to the need for a true DCC format and asset wrapper that is necessary to make true network and cloud based computing possible.
Once it became clear that AutoDesk was still going to support open licensing all on going development on the Collada ended in about 2008 so as far as on going updates goes is now considered an orphan format and the only updates coming from custom open sourced projects as to special needs.
The long way of saying that FBX is a lot more than just a format containing data but is the means of translating data across a broad range of platforms that is transparent to the end user that maintains the continuity of the original source.
If you want support for Collada because you’re using Blender for FBX and have problems with the materials, have to say the Collada support right now is not active in Blender, so probably will be even worst.
I’m getting material instances when importing a mesh but they are white and have no parameters set.
And you can re-assign materials after you import FBX into UE4.
But the materials don’t look like they did in the 3d program. They are blank and I need to rework them.
What did you expect? Materials in Blender/MAX and materials in UE4 are different. I’d be surprised if materials from 3D app translated directly into UE4 or any other engine. As a matter of fact, I don’t see why would you even want to set up materials in 3D app when you still have to tweak them in UE4. At one point you might want to go beyond basics and you would have to make new materials for your models in UE4.
I think it’s a backward approach when making art for games, especially in Blender. Make your model, UV map it, bring it to UE4 and finish everything else inside UE4.
Here are some docs on how to set up materials that will import with FBX with examples of what translates from maya/max. I assume it is similar with Blender. If FBX files with materials in them are not importing correctly from blender open an answerhub post about it and attach the broken FBX file and we can take a look to see what is going on.
It is much better to provide comprehensive support or import of one format rather than two/three formats… Probably one can just convert a collada file to fbx and then only, export it into UE4.