MeshRenderer.materials

Questions & Answers
1

Hey guys I'm probably doing something really silly, but I've been trying to generate a mesh with multiple materials through script. Everything else works great, but I ran into some strange behavior with MeshRenderer.materials

Basically if I set the material (singular) property to an existing material everything works fine, but if I try to set it through materials it gets ignored and I'm not sure why.

GameObject gameObj = World.Instance.GetObject();
Material mat = World.Instance.GetMaterial();
MeshRenderer meshRenderer = gameObj.GetComponent<MeshRenderer>();

// Works fine
//meshRenderer.material = mat;

// Does nothing
meshRenderer.materials = new Material[1];
meshRenderer.materials[0] = mat;

// However this gives me the color component of my material
meshRenderer.materials[0].CopyPropertiesFromMaterial(mat);

Also if someone knows how the four material properties relate to each other, material, materials, sharedMaterial and sharedMaterials I'd love to know. For example if I wanted 1 shared material and 2 instanced materials how would I set that up?

Also I just realized I never actually tried it with more than one material, I don't know if that would make a difference.

Thanks.

2

Some properties in unity don't work as expected. Lots of Getters actually return a copy of the datastructure, and not a pointer to it. Try creating a Material[] array yourself, setting all of its properties (like you did) and then run

meshRenderer.materials = myMaterialArray;

etc.