nixarn wrote

Edit: Hmm I switched to Unity's normal sprite shader and it seems to work again. Does that make sense?

Changing skeleton_animation.Skeleton.R/G/B/A values alone should not break batching.

Are you sure that you are not still applying any calls to set Material properties, or still assigning a MaterialPropertyBlock with _FillColor or another spine-unity specific Material proeprty set? That would explain the behaviour that it does not break batching when using a built-in Unity shader (which does not have these parameters), but breaks batching when using a Spine shader.

nixarn wrote

Hey,

We used to have an effect on our enemies when they got hit, that was done with the _FillColor, which is nice as you can have values higher than rgba(1,1,1,1). But as modifying the shader values broke the batching that wasn't ideal. Then I read that you can just change the vertex colors and that won't break batching (http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-unity#Changing-Materials-Per-Instance)

However it still seems to break batching. The only thing I do now, is when an enemy get hit I do the following:

skeleton_animation.Skeleton.R = 1f;
skeleton_animation.Skeleton.G = 0.2f;
skeleton_animation.Skeleton.B = 0.2f;
skeleton_animation.Skeleton.A = 1f;

As soon as that's called, the material is changed from "enemies_Material" to "enemies_Material (instance)" so I unity creates a clone of the material and breaks batching.

What might I be doing wrong? Thanks a lot!

Edit: Hmm I switched to Unity's normal sprite shader and it seems to work again. Does that make sense?

Niklas

I'm new to spine but generally speaking if you talk to a shader via c# scripting at runtime in unity it will create a new instance of the material that shader is running on always. So you're not doing anything wrong that's just how unity works. One way around it is to talk to the .sharedMaterial instead of the material directly if you are trying to affect something for many objects but even still all of those objects will now be broken out of the initial rendering batch and processed separately. Is it causing a performance concern for your project? generally a few instanced materials that break batching should be okay

Welcome to Spine! 8) Thanks for already contributing and helping others!

Here the problem is though that changing skeleton_animation.Skeleton.R/G/B/A values alone should not change anything in regards to Materials, it just sets different vertex colors at the mesh. So adding or removing skeleton_animation.Skeleton.R/G/B/A should not have any effect on the number of Materials used, and not affect batching.