Instancing a material

We've seen how to set up the material graph for a small prop in the previous recipe, something that we are sure to be doing multiple times every time we create a new material. Something extra that we can now do is to create an instance of that previous asset: basically, a copy of the previous material that is quicker to edit and that doesn't need to be compiled every time we make a change.

This technique is especially useful precisely because of the removal of that compile time. As you've probably seen by now, every time you make a change to a material, you are then forced to click on the Compile and Save buttons. This can be a time consuming process in complex materials, especially if we only want to tweak a certain color or a specific value. Furthermore, the lack of compilation means that this specific type of asset can be dynamically changed at runtime, which is quite powerful!

Getting ready

We are going to continue to work on the scene we saw in the previous recipe...