Changing Textures at Runtime in Unity

SuppaDuppaX

I've been having a hell of a time trying to make a workaround for swapping textures at run time. The game I am currently working on has different "units" which are each different spine characters.

I need to be able to swap textures because each unit will be assigned to a different team colour. I would much rather try to avoid having to export each unit's spine project 4 times, each time swapping each sprite with a different team colour and instead assign the skeleton a different material or texture.

I've read that the mesh renderer material is overwritten by the SkeletonRenderer in the LateUpdate but I couldn't for the life of me find a solution to my problem.

What does seem to work is to change the material in the MonoBehaviour Update but doing that every frame would be expensive, especially for multiple units with multiple teams.

I'm looking into messing with the SkeletonData class but it might get messy.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

Jessixia

This seems like a usecase for using Skins. Then you can use the one model and just set the skin for the team

Pharan

There's always a possibility that your skeleton requires more than one texture/material in varying and repeating orders.
This is the main reason why you can't just swap them out as you would in a renderer with a 3D model in Unity.

Fortunately, we added a solution for this a while back. If you want to swap the material, you can add this to your script:

void Start () {
     var skeletonAnimation = GetComponent<SkeletonAnimation>();
     skeletonAnimation.CustomMaterialOverride.Add(originalMaterial, replacementMaterial);
}

SuppaDuppaX

I'm using the spine Mecanim controller. Does this also apply to SkeletonAnimator.CustomMaterialOverride() ?

I can't seem to get it to work for SkeletonAnimator. I wonder if I'm doing something wrong.

Thanks for all the help so far.

Edit:

Everything seems to be working. Thanks for the help!

Pharan

It also applies to SkeletonAnimator. It's actually a property of their shared base class, SkeletonRenderer.

kbm

Here's a tip: Try using Unity's MaterialPropertyBlocks (https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/MaterialPropertyBlock.html) in conjunction with the custom Sprite Shaders by ToddRivers (http://esotericsoftware.com/forum/Sprite-Shaders-for-Unity-5838). This lets you change parameters like hue, color/tint, brightness etc. per instance/gameObject..which might be what you're looking for if you just need to give things different colors for teams etc.

Pharan

That's also correct. MaterialPropertyBlock will also work if you only need to change the texture and you only have one material/texture.
For single-texture, MaterialPropertyBlock would be the way to go.
Spine-Unity Runtime Documentation: Setting Material Properties Per Instance