Use MaterialPropertyBlocks to change the color of materials

[sea212]

As of now, the override of the WearNTear Highlight function within Extension.cs does copy materials and directly modify the color field of the materials:

PlanBuild/PlanBuild/Extensions.cs

Lines 35 to 46 in 02d68bb

	foreach (OldMeshData oldMaterial in self.m_oldMaterials)
	{
	if ((bool)oldMaterial.m_renderer)
	{
	Material[] materials = oldMaterial.m_renderer.materials;
	foreach (Material obj in materials)
	{
	obj.SetColor("_EmissionColor", color * 0.3f);
	obj.color = color;
	}
	}
	}

This leads to the creation of new material instances. Creating new instances is on one hand unnecessarily expensive in terms of computational time and in terms of memory (which can be neglected in that case) and on the other hand causes issues with material caching, as it is done in the following code snippet:

PlanBuild/PlanBuild/Utils/ShaderHelper.cs

Lines 129 to 132 in 02d68bb

	if (!OriginalMaterialDict.ContainsKey(originalMaterial.name))
	{
	OriginalMaterialDict[originalMaterial.name] = originalMaterial;
	}

As new instances haven new names, this caching mechanism is not only inefficient but also prone to storing wrong original material information (such as saving materials that are colored).

Solution
Use MaterialPropertyBlocks (see unity documentation and explanatory article) to change the color of materials.
I suggest to use the ColorfulPieces mod, which provides a clean and efficient implementation, or alternatively implement it completely by yourself (example).

Notes

• Remove OriginalMaterialDict name caching hack once implemented