Time.deltaTime making color lerp appear fast, but won't reach 1

[CloverKitsune]

I’m scripting in C# and having an issue with a color lerp. I set up an object to fade out with Time.deltaTime (I wanted the user to be able to set the fadeDuration in seconds, for example, 5), it fades out smoothly, but much too quickly, and when I check the fadeTimer, it’s still crawling up at a tiny fraction of 1, which doesn’t seem to make sense. Does anyone know how I can make the duration more accurate? I want to destroy this thing when the timer reaches > 1 which isn’t happening with this code I’ve got.

void Update ()
	{
		if (startFade)											// fade enabled
		{
			print (fadeTimer);
			if (fadeTimer < 1)
			{
				renderer.material.color = Color.Lerp (renderer.material.color, Color.clear, fadeTimer);
				fadeTimer += Time.deltaTime / fadeDuration;		// advance timer by fractions
			}
			else
			{
				Destroy (gameObject);							// once lerp is done (timer = 1), delete object
			}
		}
	}

[whydoidoit]

Your problem is that you are lerping from the already lerped colour. For the effect you are looking for you need to store the original colour when the lerp starts and continue to Lerp from that. The way you have it now:

Lets say the orginal colour is red, and we’ll ignore the other components:

The first time you call Lerp the value of red assume a value between 1 and 0 - let’s say it goes 1/8 the way, so now the value is 0.875 - next time around you are no longer lerping between 1 and 0, you are now lerping between 0.875 and 0 so the same 1/8 the way would have a much greater effect (we are now 1/4 the way there) than the first step and the value would become 0.66 etc etc