Thanks for the reply, hope you had a good TDay too!
I think I have it sorted out. I’m almost certain I dragged in a folder for several assets (rocks and stumps) from megascans, after downloading them, but there was no meshes, then there were all these textures with LOD labels on them I started thinking these were somehow supposed to be meshes.
So it turns out there were .fbx files associated with these assets in those folders that had not been transferred into the project, and that there are no materials that come with them. So I used the material I made following along with a landscape tutorial which works well.
So a material must be assigned to this asset and megascans does not provide one. This makes sense in hind sight since each DCC program would have it’s own methodology to handle textures. At a minimum you could always just make a simple material and attach the associated textures to the appropriate nodes,
I’ve assumed up till now that a material simply applies textures to an entire mesh, spreading this textures or qualities over the entire object, and that any variation in the color if a rock is because those textures have the variations painted into them.
Yesterday I looked at some rock assemblies that seem to include say moss, or a log and wondered would there be separate meshes that require separate materials? Yet, the mesh seemed to be one piece. Maybe I need to look at it again. Here is an example: