Materials tab

You can use this tab to change how Unity deals with Materials and Textures when importing your model.

When Unity imports a Model without any Material assigned, it uses the Unity diffuse Material. If the Model has Materials, Unity imports them as sub-Assets.

If your Model has Textures, you can also extract them into your Project using the Extract Textures button.

Use Embedded Materials

When you choose Use Embedded Materials for the Location option, the following import options appear:

(A) Click the Extract Materials and Extract Textures buttons to extract all Materials and Textures that are embedded in your imported Asset. These are greyed out if there are no sub-Assets to extract. Below these buttons, Unity displays any messages about the import process.

(B) The On Demand Remap section provides the Naming and Search properties which allow you to customize how Unity maps imported Materials to the Model. Click the Search and Remap button to remap your imported Materials to existing Material Assets. Nothing changes if Unity can’t find any Materials with the correct name.

(C) Unity displays all imported Materials found in the Asset in the Remapped Materials list. If Unity can’t automatically match each Material to an existing Material Asset in your Project, you can set references to the Materials yourself in this list.

Remapped Materials

New imports or changes to the original Asset do not affect extracted Materials. If you want to re-import the Materials from the source Asset, you need to remove the references to the extracted Materials in the Remapped Materials list. To remove an item from the list, select it and press the Backspace key on your keyboard.

Naming

Define a naming strategy for the Materials.

Search

Define where Unity tries to locate existing Materials when it uses the name defined by the Naming option.

Material description

Starting with version 2019.3, Unity introduced the ability to modify the Material mapping during import via scripting. Users can modify how Unity maps the imported Material properties from the data embedded in an FBX file to Unity Material properties. The Material description defines a name and several sets of values that describe the Material and any Textures it references. For more information about the structure of this description, see the MaterialDescription class reference page.

When in ImportViaMaterialDescription mode, the Model importer delegates the creation of Materials to the AssetPostProcessor.OnPreprocessMaterialDescription callback.

Unity provides default implementations of this Post Processor that handle the following Materials:

• FBX Standard Material, Arnold Standard, Autodesk Interactive and 3Ds Physical Material from FBX files
• Sketchup, Collada and 3DS Materials

These default implementations handle importing Materials differently from the ImportStandard mode, including the following improvements:

• It supports more Material types, such as Autodesk’s Arnold and Interactive, or Physical, as well as Unity’s HDRP Materials.

• It supports Emissive Materials.

• If a diffuse Texture is set, it ignores the diffuse color (this matches how it works in Autodesk® Maya® and Autodesk® 3ds Max®).

• It takes the bump factor, the emissive color, and emissive factor into account.

• It imports emissive color animation when defined in the FBX file.

  Note: 3ds Max does not export emissive color animation, so Unity cannot import it.

• It imports transparent Materials as fully transparent. The legacy system imports them as fully opaque.

In addition, it imports all Autodesk Interactive Material property animations and no longer ignores the opacity when importing Materials from 3DS files.

Use External Materials (Legacy)

When you choose Use External Materials (Legacy) for the Location option, the following import options appear:

This option extracts Materials and saves them externally instead of saving them inside your Model Asset. The Naming and Search properties help Unity find imported Materials to map to the Model.

Before Unity version 2017.2, this was the default way of handling Materials.

• Materials tab added in 2017.2 NewIn20172
• Use Embedded Materials added in 2017.3 NewIn20173
• Import via Material Description added in 2019.3 NewIn20193