You should be able to move the uasset file from one project to another, but you need to also move the textures along.
for my personal workflow I have a Materials folder that includes a Texture folder in all projects.
So if imo want I can quickly copy textures / materials and I always know where to find them.
The names unfortunately have to get pretty complicated - i started adding the name of the mesh they belong to to it in order to figure out what’s what.
This wont matter at first, but when you start pushing 150 base materials it gets though.
the other options people use are Master materials - a material that takes Textures as parameters, so you can replace them by instance.
This is great if you have all your textures.
More often then not in my case I design materials without textures or with as little use of textures as I can for it’s far too complicated to get the specularity/ao/displacement stuff going off a single picture - or if I really need them unusually I end up making a 3d model and baking the maps off it.
Other then master materials you can use Material Functions to achieve some of the standard things you find your self doing constantly - bumping up a normal map intensity.
overlaying color to a desaturated texture.
The material functions can also be moved by copying the uasset file.
Note: the engine will complain if the materials are from an older version of the engine and you copy them into the current version. For those cases it’s best to migrate.
