Change the materials of a list of game objects to one material, and then change it back to their old ones.

Questions & Answers
1

I want to change all of materials on a game object’s child objects to a simple silhouette material, and then change them back to the old ones when user inputs a certain command.
My functions are as below:

public List<Material> mats;
public Material SilhouetteMaterial;

     public void AttachSilhouette()
        {
            mats = new List<Material>();

            var childrenRenderers = objects.GetComponentsInChildren<Renderer>();

            foreach (var childRenderer in childrenRenderers)
            { 
       
               //Material NewOne = new Material(childRenderer.material);
               //mats.Add(NewOne);
                
                mats.Add(childRenderer.material);
                childRenderer.material = SilhouetteMaterial;
            }
        }
        public void DetachSilhouette()
        {
            var childrenRenderers = objects.GetComponentsInChildren<Renderer>();
            int t = 0;
            foreach (var childRenderer in childrenRenderers)
            {
                childRenderer.material = mats[t];
                t++;
            }
            mats.Clear();

        }

However this problem is, executing function AttachSilouette() seems to give me a list of silhouette material instead of the original materials on these game objects that I want to cache. If I comment out the line childRenderer.material = SilhouetteMaterial; then it will actually give me a list of the materials that I want to cache.
Can someone tell me why this is happening? I figured that maybe the list only stores a list of reference so I tried creating a material instance before adding it to the list however it doesn’t work either.

2

I’m not sure but you might be saving a reference to the renderer’s material slot instead of the actual material in that slot. Try making a new material in your list by using the Material constructor and copying the “original Material” instead of referencing it Unity - Scripting API: Material.Material

Alternatively, play around with switching shaders instead of materials. I do this in my game for a similar effect. See “flashing effect” in Google for examples.

Areleli