Okay, after some more digging I found it. There are multiple stock pipelines, such as Asset, Material, Texture and SceneAsset.
- SceneAsset pipeline exists out of the box, but is not registered as one of the default pipelines to select. You have to add it manually in project settings:
- Then it will become available for selection in the GLTF import dialog:
- The default pipeline assets are stored in the engine assets folder. You can open them and compare their configuration. The culprit setting is called “Bake Meshes” (poor name IMO, should be “Bake Transforms”):
- This setting is hidden for both initial import and reimport for both Asset and SceneAsset pipeline. This makes some sense in terms of reducing room for user error, but wrecks the discoverability and understanding of what’s happening.
- If you have some “scene” as in multiple meshes that should be arranged in relation to each other while having the pivot preserved, you’d want to use the SceneAsset pipeline.
- If you have just a set of individual assets stored in one file, you want to use just the Asset pipeline.
