Discussion Material Variants: your thoughts and usages

These came out of nowhere, for me, as I jumped from 2019LTS to 2022LTS.
I've tried them. Found them buggy (in and of themselves with BiRP and with prefabs) and conflicting with TMP Material Presets in all sorts of horrific ways.

Was this endeavour something to do with shader compilation time issues?

Here's the blog post if you've missed this new feature:

https://blog.unity.com/engine-platf...ution-for-managing-complex-material-libraries

 

It says what they're for in the article you linked. The entire purpose of them is to make it easier to manage what would normally be a large number of materials that use the same shader but would otherwise just have some property differences.

 

I've been using Unity long enough, and living long enough, to know that any justifications used are, at best, excuses.

 

Except this wouldn't do anything about shader compilation times. This exists because previously the best workflows were either "use a whole S***load of materials" or "roll your own solution with material property blocks."

 

Do Material Variants provide the performance benefits of Material Property Blocks?

 

No, they're workflow tools.

 

Seems to just be prefab variants but for materials. I find prefab variants pretty damn useful so I imagine I'd find this useful when I start up a 2022 project.