koobas.hobune.stream
Changing vertex colors break batching?
Hello everyone, i have to recolor some meshes on my scene, and since shader i use can work with vertex color, so i decided to try just change colors of vertexes runtime. But then i faced with increasing batches. Recolored mesh doesn't batch with others, despite they share one material. I decided to check it again and create empty project with two standart unity's quads. Material use shader (Particles/AlphaBlended) and "Default particle" as Texture. Then i attached to one of quads script, that change its colors.
void Start () {
mesh = this.GetComponent<MeshFilter>().mesh;
Color[] colors = new Color[mesh.vertexCount];
for (int i = 0; i < colors.Length; i++)
colors[i] = Color.black;
mesh.colors = colors;
}
But after all i get 2 batches, instead of 1. Enable script = 2 batches, disable script = 1batch. Same material, only 4 verts in each object. What have i missed? Where is my mistake? Shouldn't it be batched?
UPDATE I managed to get quads batched. First of all i changed in script mesh property, to sharedMesh, which is according to Unitydocs actuall asset in library. After that, as expected, all my quads became black. Then i changed script again and put mesh thing back. And here we are, 1 batch for at least 6 squads colored with different colors. Anybody have a suggestions why is it works like that? I suspect, that i forget to turn off some checkbox somewhere, or read some manual article. Looks like, that changing shared mesh colors change something else as well. Any help?
That's.... weird! $$anonymous$$aybe changing to shared$$anonymous$$esh and back again to mesh woke up something in the rendering pipeline? Can you recreate that fix in a new project?
There's nothing wrong with your understanding or your code. Vertex colours are assigned to the mesh, not material properties, so you can batch together meshes with different coloured verts just fine.
I can produce any number of different coloured quads using the steps you describe, as shown below (note that in order to get down to just one batch, I had to set the camera flag to "Don't Clear" - drawing the background/skybox takes at least one batch on its own - I wonder if that is skewing your figures?) 
Also be sure to have batching enabled under Project -> Player Settings.
Hi, thank you for answer. I used camera flag background, but with using "don't clear" i get same results. Only if change flag to skybox i see additional drawcall. Batching is enabled. Here what i get.
But you will get additional drawcalls for the skybox - that's to be expected. But, choose a solid colour background, say, and you'll get two batches - one for the background, and one for as many vertex-coloured meshes as share the same material as you want.
I chose don't clear and get 2 batches as well, that what i wanted to say. And 3 batches, if i choose skybox, since skybox also do drawcall, as you mentioned above. Sorry for misunderstanding
$$anonymous$$ore than that. This recolored quads don't even want to batch with each other. Each additional quad adds 1 drawcall. Enabling and disabling dynamic batching in player settings affects immediately with 2 drawcalls for non-colored quads. 
If I recreate that scene (I'm using 5.3.3f1) I get 2 batches as expected, so there must be something else different about your scene, project settings, or something that's preventing batching occurring. 
I also tried to recreate same situation in Unity 4.6 and of course it works perfectly well there. 1 drawcall for all quads. In Unity 5.4.0 problem remains. Well, anyway, thank you for help and patience
Ignore these lies.. ---Changing the vertex colors is building a new set of data that has to be sent to the gpu separately. That means a new batch.---
Huh? No it doesn't. It's just adding properties to vertices of the existing mesh data.
You're right. I was remembering this: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/525327/batch-drawcalls-of-gameobjects-with-a-script-attac.html incorrectly.
I saw related topics here, where people said that it should work well.
You can still batch them after you have done changing vertex colors:
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/StaticBatchingUtility.html
Thanks for answer. This is quite useful tool, but unfortunately they said it blocks transform for objects, which is not acceptable for me :(
It's sad that every approach works only when the objects are static, as in Unity Cookies Tutorial.
