I did the test with 20 each of the same character. I didn’t see much of a difference in the number of draw calls. It was too hard to tell whether it was slightly better or slightly worse. I ran it twice and the results seemed to contradict.
At the very least I know that my method isn’t achieving its goal of increased efficiency. I either need to make separate materials or find another way to implement this parameter switch.
Is there any more efficient way of being able to select from among more than two options in a parameter? Or are you essentially forced to use nested static switches?
My problem is that to achieve what I wanted, I had to have a long string of nested lerps (one for each substance), then duplicate that string once for every masked portion of the model…