What is the difference between material and material instance?
Hi!
You can create a “parent” material with certain settings (color, roughness…). You can set any of these settings (color, roughness…) as a parameter so that this could be a changeable setting in the instance, but nothing else from the parent material…
So when you create an instance of the main/parent material you’ll have a material with changeable settings only set as parameter in the main/parent material. If you have a really complex material in your scene and you’d need it with different colors it’s cheaper to have 1 material with the color instances than to have the complex material x times as color variants…
Hope one of them makes sense! 