When Unity imports a model, it also imports the materials linked to the model in the 3D editor. By default, the materials are named based on the names of the textures used in the 3D editor to build them.
If you remember from the previous chapter, upon importing a model into Unity, we set an option in the Model tab to pick material names from a model's materials, instead of the texture names. Refer to the following screenshot to checkout what we did in Chapter 1, Importing 3D Models and Animations:
We adopt this solution because it helps keep our project clean and has each asset named correctly. As our goal is to have the materials named with a meaningful convention that can help us keep materials and their textures well separated, in the following recipe, we'll show you how to add custom names to materials in Maya, to be exported into Unity.