Inspector / Mesh Renderer option greyed out? Trying to replace Material...

Pretty new to Unity a lot of new things to get accustomed to. Been trying to find the solution on googles search, youtube video tutorials and within the Unity Documentation. Found a lot of workarounds but nothing concrete.

How do exactly do I apply the pre made material I created to replace the material created during import of the model? These are coming from 3dsMax since it currently doesn't support PBR textures, I cant necessarily pre apply the textures. Nevertheless it would seem a bit redundant not being able to edit those properties within the engine. Am I missing something?

 

What you have selected there is a subpart of an imported model in the project. You can't change that, because it's imported data — at best you could change the import settings (on the parent object).

But once you instantiate such a model in the scene, then it's a GameObject, and you can override any properties you like. So, try selecting the weapon stand in the Hierarchy tab (not the Project tab), and replacing the material there.

 

This. A common way to do it is to make a prefab of the model. That way you can uniformly apply changes across multiple scenes.

 

Well my goal here is to great a package for the Asset Store. It feels inconvenient to have to provide prefabs for every single mesh object in the project just so I can apply the correct material. This may even be bloating the project with unnecessary files.

Am I Importing files incorrectly?

 

Yes, it should be possible to have the materials automatically found by the importer provided they have the correct name and location. Study the import options — it explains there where it will be looking for the materials relative to the model itself.

 

I looked into the import settings doc, there's definitely a setting for it look for a materiel before it creates one. For posterity, I applied a material in 3dsmax and as long as a material of the same name exists in Unity it will unify the assets regardless of texture content.
I'm starting to get he feeling Unity is a very programmer inclined, as an artist I'm craving more intuitive features.
Thanks a lot for the help! =D