Material alpha not updating at runtime

Questions & Answers
1

I’m attempting to clone a material and apply it to an object at runtime. All properties seem to carry over, but for some reason the transparency stops working.

Script:

using UnityEngine;

public class MaterialApply : MonoBehaviour
{
	public Material copyMaterial;

	private void Start ()
	{
		Material newMaterial = new Material(copyMaterial);
		GetComponent<MeshRenderer>().material = newMaterial;
	}
}

On the left is an object with the material applied inside the editor. You can see the transparency working fine. On the right is a blank cube that the material will be copied to at runtime:

alt text

Here is the result after the material is copied at runtime:

alt text

You can see the material sort of copied over, but the object is opaque.

If I select the target cube, you can see all the properties are there, including alpha:
alt text

Any idea why this is happening? I suspect there is just some UpdateMaterialType() or similar function I need to call somewhere.

2

Use Instantiate(…) instead of new Material(…)