What would be the best way to use a texture atlas on multiple instances of a mesh?

Questions & Answers
1

I have multiple instances of the same mesh in a scene – how can I specify a different set of co-ordinates (x, y, w, h) on each instance in order to reference a section in an atlased texture?

According to the documentation, the MonoBehaviour functions OnPreRender and OnPostRender (which I was planning to use to pass the co-ordinate values separately to each instance) only work on cameras, and setting the atlasing co-ordinates in the material would require that each instance of the mesh have a different material – is is even possible for different instances of the same mesh to use different materials?

I can’t make multiple copies of the mesh as the scene is already close to the maximum memory limit of the Unity editor.

2

You are going to have to modify the UV coordinates of each mesh to use the different section of the texture. This will allow you to use a single material.