It used to be that if I used an image as my material on a piece of geometry in Sketchup (not tiling, but a full mapped image for a geometry face) and loaded it into UNREAL, I could create a new material in Unreal with the same image and replace the material and it would align and scale perfectly. Making us able to then take advantage of the superior material options in Unreal. This was a sort of UV placeholder. This is no longer the case. Now if I want to create a new material in Unreal, even using the same image as my base, I have to fully remap that material and geometry. It used to be a much easier switch out, PLEASE bring that back. It is not a workaround to make those edits to the materials that load-in with Datasmith, because if I make a change to my Sketchup model and reload it, all of those changes are erased and requires an entire start over. I am a theater scenic designer. Most of the geometry I bring in has a custom image mapped to it that I want to then make look better but have better control in Unreal.
same here, 5.x datasmith now bakes per-face UVs instead of preserving the SketchUp material slot so image swap no longer lines up.
workaround: in SketchUp, wrap texture onto each face as Project Texture instead of just painting it. datasmith then imports that as proper UV0 you can reuse. still one extra click per material but keeps alignment through re-import.
long term file a bug with Epic — the old mapping was way friendlier for architectural workflows.