Assigning Material to Every Sub-mesh

Hello there!

We have some spells in our game that are visualized by adding another material to the current one (i.e. layer of ice when enemy is frozen). For most enemies, this works and looks great, but certain models use multiple materials (i.e. one for body and one for weapon, or one for body and one for hair, etc.), which is achieved by creating multiple groups within 3D editing software. Unfortunately, if I add an material to the renderer, it only applies to the first group. Which, in some cases, is just the weapon or the hair.

Is there any way to mark the target group id/submesh for the newly added material, so I can add it to all of them?

This is the current code I use:

Code (CSharp):

1. public void AddMaterial(Renderer targetRenderer, Material targetMaterial)
2. {
3.     if (!targetRenderer || !targetMaterial)
4.     {
5.         return;
6.     }
7.  
8.     var dynamicMaterials = new List<Material>();
9.     for (int i = 0; i < targetRenderer.materials.Length; i++)
10.     {
11.         var material = targetRenderer.materials[i];
12.         if (!material.name.Contains(targetMaterial.name))
13.         {
14.             dynamicMaterials.Add(material);
15.         }
16.     }
17.  
18.     dynamicMaterials.Add(targetMaterial);
19.  
20.     var materials = new Material[dynamicMaterials.Count];
21.  
22.     for (int i = 0; i < dynamicMaterials.Count; i++)
23.     {
24.         materials[i] = dynamicMaterials[i];
25.     }
26.  
27.     targetRenderer.materials = materials;
28. }

I'm probably missing something simple and obvious, but I would appreciate any help.

Thanks a lot!

 

multi/sub materials in Unity use the material ID from the 3d software package. changing the order of the materials is a bad idea. This could and probably will have effects like changing the hair texture to be on the weapon.

What you are trying to do needs to be done at the shader level. So the shader says. Display my texture and/or other properties, and add these effects based on what my game requires. So you let the shader do this in the math.

You get this by giving the shader a new value. IceAmount or something like that. You then take the ice texture. (which is assigned to every material) and Lerp it onto the rendered texture.

 

Thank you! The problem is, that we don't have any competent shader developer right now, and this goes beyond my skills.

I don't really change order of materials. I keep the two that it already had, and add one on top of it. Unity shows the last material on top of the original one (unlike the character material, the ice uses transparent shader with UV animation - it's not just a texture; it looks cool, and it doesn't seem that the extra draw call creates any noticable performance issues). But it only does it on one of the submeshes (after today's investigation it seems that it's actually the last one, not the first - but not sure), even if you add it multiple times. Isn't there any way to assign a material to certain ID, so I can just add two of them and assign them properly?