Allow Godot 4 to import meshes in bulk and share materials

[darkcanopy]

https://x.com/KenneyNL/status/1930878990899646677?t=XGcV3_Ax_NAu4F25cS3qhw&s=19

Currently, if you import a bunch of models you have to individually assign them a material which is really tedious as Kenney pointed out without multi selection. Can we add the ability to import a ton of gltfs at once, and also allow them to share materials, without having to merge them into a giant one?

[darkcanopy]

Also, multiselection being missing for editing multiple mesh materials at once is a glaring omission that would make work 100 times less tedious if you could just edit a bunch of models materials at once.

[nbaum]

A relatively light touch way to implement this could be to add import settings to use external materials by default (and, ideally, to set a directory to create them in). Since import settings can already be set in bulk, you could set it for all selected files at once and then bulk reimport them.

[DillonRossGithubThing]

Drag and drop for individual material slots should be a high priority too. The other 2 big game engines have this feature and it should just be standard across all engines for how much time it saves for artists.

Edit to clarify: I mean dragging a material into the 3d scene and dropping onto a region of a mesh. Currently this behavior applies the material across the mesh as a whole, ignoring material slots.

[a-johnston]

it could be useful as a standalone editor tool to be able to generate content hashes and show all duplicate resources across a selection of files, or the entire project. This could be then incorporated at import time to support this sort of feature, but also used for existing projects or other cases.

[Calinou]

• Related to Missing import asset storage options and poor click-economy and performance for asset extraction godot#75924
  and Add an import setting to assign an external material to an imported mesh by default like in Godot 3 #12566.

Can you check if godotengine/godot#107211 addresses this?