Trying to import an fbx which has multiple mesh sections into one static mesh asset. Each mesh section is supposed to have their own material, unfortunately the only way to have them all be imported into one mesh (by enabling the “Combine Meshes” flag) will force all sections to use one material.
The only way I’ve found to resolve this is to have them import as separate meshes, assign unique materials to each of them and then combine the actors. But that process is tedious and not practical for doing in bulk.
Is there a way I can use the “Combine Meshes” flag and have each mesh section get its own material automatically, or is there a way once the combined mesh is imported to give the sections their own material?
With blender, so long as all your material names are different, the import process will merge the mesh and leave each material alone.
If you name your materials all the same, then yes, they are definitely getting merged too.
note
There is 0 benefit to merging the model without combining the UVs into a single object that uses a single texture and a single material.
Each material is a drawcall and several textures, adding a lot of memory footprint to an object that you want combined. So just combining it wont really do anything except for make it easier to manage the object in the level (one thing to click and move instead of a collection of things).
This goes back to proper asset workflow, sounds like your process/idea is a bit flawed.
Sometimes you need multiple materials, so maybe it ain’t. Depends on end goal.