With a little encouragement from Wingy, I have set up a simple playground that allows me to append a very simple file from my Dropbox.
Playground
Everything looks fine - right?
Well no! The image below is the same file dropped (from my local end of Dropbox) into the Sandbox and you see the sphere is red.
The material code in the babylon file is :
"materials":[{"name":"ball_plane.red","id":"ball_plane.red","ambient":[1,0,0],"diffuse":[0.8,0,0],"specular":[0.5,0.5,0.5],"emi