- While Render Engine is set to Cycles, Regardless of Material color or Viewport Color of the material, Materials do not export with Color information (FBX). They will only export if material "use_nodes" is set False. To do that artists needs to switch to Blender Render. It's very clunky and unpredictable workflow.
- While exporting FBX Materials when use_nodes is enabled, GAMMA is not taken into account (2.2 needs to be applied). As a result target software loads it Darker.
Why is this important? When working with Game assets, colored materials are assigned to parts of highpoly mesh that is then baked onto LowPoly where Material colors become ID Masks (please google for more examples). 1) makes this task of exporting materials very clunky, wasteful, confusing and disappointing when bakes show blank. 2) creates very DARK materials which are very hard to color key and share in production between applications.
To summarize. Please consider small tweak to .fbx exporter to carry material color information regardless of render engine (e.g if Cycles, viewport_color should be exported). Also please apply Gamma fix (e.g obj.active_material.diffuse_color[0] = math.pow(obj.active_material.diffuse_color[0],1/2.2) )
B 2.79.
Thank You