How to use the same parent material for different textures in UI

How to use the same parent material
for different textures in UI

You, kind of, answered your own question.

  • each widget holds an instance editable 2D Texture variable
  • when Initialised (or Construct, or Pre-Construct - depends what you do with the widgets), have that widget create a Dynamic Material Instance and pipe in the said var as a material parameter

Hope I understood you right.

I have been using Sprite before, but there are a lot of textures that have been made on the art side, and now they want to replace all of them with dynamic materials containing the original texture.