Resolved Best way to change material of an entity in ISystem run time?

Hey everyone,

In my game I need to change an entity's material when the player get close to it.

I have thousands of entities spreading around, so I must use ISystem with Burst for best performance.

The issue is - changing shared components like "RenderMeshArray" in ISystem is impossible (hopefully I'm wrong).

So what is the best approach to achieve my goal?

I thought maybe use both ISystem and SystemBase: ISystem to check the distance repeatedly to the player, and SystemBase to change the material of the entity in the main thread when the entity is close enough.

Does someone have a better approach? Or this is wrong and I'm missing something?
I will be more than happy to hear!

Thanks!

 

there's a way to change material properties easily using just components:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/c...phics@1.0/manual/material-overrides-code.html

it would be better than switching the whole material, if thats an option for you

 

This is actually very interesting! I didn't know that and I will definitely look in to it, thanks!

 

If you want to change material and not the material property, you can do this with MaterialMeshInfo. You'll need to register the material to the EntitiesGraphicsSystem and get its BatchMaterialID. There is an example of how to register in the EntityComponentSystemSamples\URPSamples\Assets\SampleScene\MaterialMeshChange. After this you can use the BatchMaterialID in a burst job to change the entity's material by updating its MaterialMeshInfo component. You'll probably want to use something like a NativeHashMap to store the BatchMaterialID with a key.

 

Man, you don't know how much you helped me. After some coding and debugging I finally got it to work, with a lot of help to your answer. Thanks again!!