Need SetSharedMaterials/SetMaterials methods on Renderers to avoid allocations

Hi there

There is a GetMaterials and GetSharedMaterials method which lets you pass in your own List<Material> so that you can avoid allocating garbage when fetching the material list on a Renderer.

But without a SetMaterials and SetSharedMaterials method, this is useless because we need to convert this list to an array if we ever want to alter the materials on a renderer. The only way to set the materials is via 'renderer.sharedMaterials' or 'renderer.materials' setters, which both take arrays.

 

Agree should at least have a variant with NoAllocHelpers.ExtractArrayFromList(values)

 

Why do I feel like this is going to be one of those "advanced features" don't won't gain enough traction with the community to ever get implemented? Hopefully a Dev can respond here directly to give me some hope !

 

Sorry to necro this old thread but I just ran into this today.

Would caching both the list and the array prevent allocations?

Code (CSharp):

1. private Renderer targetRenderer;
2. private Material[] cachedMaterialArray;
3. private List<Material> cachedMaterialList;
4.  
5. void SetMaterial(int index, Material newMaterial)
6. {
7.    targetRenderer.GetSharedMaterials(cachedMaterialList);
8.    cachedMaterialList.CopyTo(cachedMaterialArray);
9.    cachedMaterialArray[materialIndex] = newMaterial;
10.    targetRenderer.sharedMaterials = cachedMaterialArray;
11. }

 

Yes, it would prevent managed allocations aside from possible list resizing.