Change child materials of a GameObject without creating instances of materials

Unity Engine
1

What I’m trying to do is select a single object of a parent and fade the rest to a specified transparent value. I’m using recursion to iterate through all the children of the parent and set all that aren’t selected to a fade_material and those that are selected to an opaque_material.

I have searched this topic for days and have not found a working solution.

I’ve tried using Renderer.material and Renderer.sharedMaterial.

Here’s my recursive code that seems to make instances of materials vs just changing the material:

private void ChangeMaterial(GameObject parent, bool excluded)
{
foreach (Transform child in parent.transform)
{
// Check if child is a parent to other children
if(child.childCount > 0)
{
// More children… check if parent node is selected
if(excluded || (child.gameObject == selectedObject))
{
ChangeMaterial(child.gameObject, true);
}
else
{
ChangeMaterial(child.gameObject, false);
}
}
else
{
if(excluded || (child.gameObject == selectedObject) || (transparencySlider.value == transparencySlider.maxValue))
{
// Opaque
Renderer rend = child.GetComponent();
rend.material = child.GetComponent().opaqueMaterials[0];
}
else
{
// Fade
Renderer rend = child.GetComponent();
rend.material = child.GetComponent().fadeMaterials[0];

}
}
}
}

Does the loop used have any affect over this issue?

Thank you for your help…

2

I’ve had some luck with creating one Material instance per desired material to use across a group of objects, and then assigning that Material instance to the sharedMaterial of all the objects I wanted to use it.

3

That’s pretty much what you’re supposed to do if you want to avoid material duplication.

Also- in the future use the Insert Code button so it’s properly formatted for the forum, most people aren’t going to bother reading your post if it’s like that.

4

Thank you chrismarch. That works. I was trying to create/store the material on each instance of a script and that was causing me my problems. Moved the material array variable to something more global, like a GameController, and referenced from there and all problems are fixed.

Looked, but never hard enough to find the code insert until you mentioned it testure… thank you.