Draw Call Conundrum

Unity Engine
1

I have sifted through the many postings on this subject and have not found an answer. Here’s the issue:

Empty scene
One script which instantiates cubes
When 100 cubes are instantiated, the draw call count goes to 201. According to the description of the dynamic batching system, these should all be batched into a single draw call.

The following changes make no difference:

Marking the source cube static.
Forcing a shared material after instantiation.
Disabling shadow casting/receiving.
Using a cube mesh from an FBX.

Removing the material reduces the draw calls down to 101.

What is the explanation for this?

2

Marking static is wrong if you want dynamic batching (which you need to turn on for it to work). If you use the same material on the cubes, it’s shared unless you do something to make each material an instance (such as changing renderer.material.color).

–Eric

3

Understood. the cubes are identical with a shared material and there is no change to renderer.material.color. Surely there is reason this simple test fails…