Is it bad to have multiple materials per object?
Texture size has little impact on speed; mipmaps ensure that few texels are actually computed on far away objects. Draw calls have a significantly higher effect on speed. Scene A: One mesh, 6 materials on it. All materials are either flat colors or less than 256×256 texture, tiling.
Why are the materials on instanced Static Meshes not working?
The rendering drop down for the Instanced Static Meshes is not so you can set the material for each instance. The Materials 0, 1, 2, etc. are referring to separate material slots for the same mesh.
When do you need to assign multiple materials to an object?
If it’s not the main material that you’re trying to change, you have to assign all of the materials on an object simultaneously. Something like this: A similar technique was used when changing colors for the legacy particle system: http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/ScriptReference/ParticleAnimator-colorAnimation.html.
Why are multiple materials in a shader bad?
The reason multiple materials is “bad” is that each material is a so-called drawcall. A drawcall involves things like loading a new shader, different textures, etc. This is normally an expensive operation (and unrelated to the amount of vertices involved).
How to reduce the number of objects rendered in Unity?
Combine close objects together, either manually or using Unity’s draw call batching. Use fewer materials in your objects by putting separate textures into a larger texture atlas. Use fewer things that cause objects to be rendered multiple times (such as reflections, shadows and per-pixel lights).
Why are compressed textures better than uncompressed textures?
Use Compressed textures to decrease the size of your textures. This can result in faster load times, a smaller memory footprint, and dramatically increased rendering performance. Compressed textures only use a fraction of the memory bandwidth needed for uncompressed 32-bit RGBA textures.