Drag & drop materials to mesh in asset mode? Or other faster ways?

Development World Creation
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When I have a mesh in my main level, I can drag and drop materials from the content browser, straight on the mesh. When the mesh has many material object ID’s (material selections), I can quickly add the full set of materials on a model. This is very fast.

But when I double click the mesh in the Content Browser, and want to globally add materials there to the source mesh, I no longer can drag the materials straight on the mesh? I have to painstakingly look through the “Details” panel, where the materials are listed as “Element 1”, “Element 2”, “Element 3”… and so on.

Not only is it slow because I have to manually read through the list and often isolate material selection to be sure that I am adding on the right place, Unreal is also very slow in this mode, and halts for like 20-30 seconds before the material is added.

It’s a bit weird, because adding materials in the levels are so instant. How can I apply materials faster to my source mesh?

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I believe you need a custom ’ Editor Utility Blueprint’. Here is an example that might help you getting started. I have never tested it myself, but it is worth checking out.
Assign a material to multiple meshes in the UE4 content browser | Editor Utility Blueprint - YouTube

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Very interesting

I managed to get it up and running, as well as adding more inputs for each Material Index.

It is close, but the popup window where I add the materials are modal, blocking the content browser, so I can’t drag and drop into the material slots. Probably there is a way to configure this? Have been searching a little bit without success so far.

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Glad it helped. Unfortunately, I can’t help you with that, because I’ve never used this type of asset before, but I know there are more resources in the community tutorials section in this forum. If you search for keywords, YT has a few good ones.

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Anything new on this front. I too like the initial poster feel this is a big short coming on the asset viewer page. Dragging and dropping like we do in the LEVEL is so intuitive. However when viewing the actual asset finding materials, isolating materials, just to find out what they are on the mesh is so time consuming. So thankful there is the ISOLATE checkbox…or it would be insane to get assets in and setup. We need to be able to setup the asset ONCE so that when we bring it in the LEVEL all the materials are setup already. If we drop the asset into the LEVEL and then give it materials, only that actor gets the materials…which is a nice thing in some cases, but starting with the proper defaults is a must in many cases.

Pretty new to Unreal, so sorry if some of the references are not completely accurate. Hopefully I’m overlooking a new feature or some way to do this in UE 5+ Thanks!