Feedback Image.material sharing material by default

The issues described in this 7-year-old thread are still present in Unity today: Image.material behaves like renderer.sharedMaterial, forcing changes to every instance of an image whenever one Image instance's material is edited. Using Image.GetComponent<CanvasRenderer>().GetMaterial() and Image.GetComponent<CanvasRenderer>().SetMaterial() produces the same issue.

In order to get around this issue, I had to resort to code like this:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2.         material = new Material( image.material );
3.  
4.        //code making changes to the newly instanced material
5.  
6.         image.GetComponent<CanvasRenderer>().SetMaterial( material , 0 );

This took a while to puzzle out. For the sake of a better user experience, I suggest surfacing a separate shared material as a sharedMaterial property and making material an instanced material the user can edit directly, as in the Renderer component--or, in the alternative, making GetMaterial() in CanvasRenderer return an instanced material.

 

...well, here's a fun new one: apparently a CanvasRenderer can have a materialCount of 0, making it impossible to CanvasRenderer.SetMaterial() without throwing a range error on the second parameter. I'm adding "fix that" to my original feedback.