May I ask what will MultiMaterial brings to the table ? I am using SPS a lot as it is one of the best things in the world (lot of meshes could be merged into one while remains movable).
I am currently using material with texture that cointains many “subtextures” and for each particle I just set proper UVS for each particle and it works perfectly.
How it will differ with multimaterial option available ? It will allow to set different material properties for each of the “submaterials” ? If so, it would be certainly great because at the moment all of my “subtextures” off course share the same material properties.
The way you’re using the SPS is actually the right way to do when using a single material and parts of a single texture.
Now let’s imagine that we want to manage some particles with, say, a standard material with a texture, some others with a standard material and a bump texture and some more others with a PBR materials.
The support of the MultiMaterial will allow to have, say, 300 particles of each of those three different materials, so 900 particles mixed together, and rendered with minimum possible number of draw calls (so 3 or 4 in total according to each material specification).
Of course, the subtextures will go on working, even, with MultiMaterials, so you’ll be able to use both features together
Thanx very much for this information. Basically at this moment I need to create 3 SPS to achieve the same result that I would have with that multimaterial (from your example) right ?
I have one more question related to SPS if I may … and maybe you will kill me outright and tell me that SPS shall not be used that way but I would like to know if there is some possibility to bind SPS particle to the bone of animated mesh - I will explain why.
Lets imagine scenario where you have like 20 orcs on the screen … and these orcs are all the same but they have different weapons - lets say sword, axe, spear, club, knife. Right now I have to use instances so there is one “core” mesh for each weapon type and as many instances as needed.
It still means 5 draw calls (one for each weapon type) but if I could position SPS particles properly to animated orc, I could have SPS that would contain all weapon types and thus only 1 draw call. I believe that binding mesh to the bone is just about positioning so seems not to be completely impossible to acheive with SPS :))
The same could be applied to parts of armor … in reality it could save lot of draw calls
arf, no worry
For now (and because I don’t know anything about them), there’s no bones support in the SPS. The thing that closes the most to bones is the particle parenting and particle pivot used together.
And you’re right : you can now do with 1 SPS what you used to do with 3 ones.
The number of draw calls depends directly on the number of used materials : one at least for a standard material, can be more for some more sophisticated effects.
: )