Embedded Materials Seem Like A Bad Idea

What's the deal with this new Material Embedding. Why would I ever want to set up and use materials from my 3d program.

It's always been enough that I get just the diffuse texture in a material with the same name in Unity. Then I change the material, put it where I want and from then on any imported object will find that material and use it. This worked perfectly.

But now, it seems like we're supposed to let it import maybe hundreds of instances of the same material, which are locked and unchangable by the way, so that every object in my environment has it's own material, crudly auto-setup with just a diffuse texture. It doesn't bring in normal maps or highlight settings etc. Not that I would want to set those up in my 3d software anyway.

I'm just wondering who this embedded material option is designed for? What's the new functionality supposed to improve.

I wouldn't have a problem with it if it wasn't now the default. And adding insult to injury, the previous method has been given the dreaded label of "Legacy".

 

There has been lots of chatter lately about really working on the Maya->Unity->Maya workflow, so it seems like part of that. For some artists being able to do almost all their work inside Maya is a good thing. I definitely agree that it should be possible to set the legacy setup as default however, was caught out by this yesterday.

 

I think you said it right there "MAYA"->Unity->"MAYA"

I'm using Max. And unless I'm missing a workflow, it just does not work.

Is it possible it ONLY works for Maya users. I hear Blender artists aren't too happy about it.

If I need to take a model out of Unity into Max (pretty rare), there's scripts that'll do it. And it's usually a terrain or something I didn't have in Max in the first place.

I've just been using it more, and if you bring a model into the scene, make a prefab of it, but forgot to switch to the "legacy" method, then apply that change afterwards, it breaks the material connections on the prefab! You have to manually drag your materials into the prefab, if you can remember which order they go in. Or ditch it and make the prefab again. It's horendous.

It's the "Legacy" thing that really bugs me. It's like they want to at some point remove the previous functionality all together.

 

Is possible to disable this feature for all new models?

 

I too don't understand why I have to do so many extra steps to be able to get a material I can edit in Unity.

And I fail to understand the intended workflow here.

 

Being able to modify embedded materials within Unity would be a huge improvement.

Edit: however the 'extract materials' function seems to actually work reliably in 2020.2 (compared to 2017.4)