Single or multiple materials for a card face

Hello Codedemen,

If I were to develop this concept myself, I would go with a blueprint for the base card with multiple plane static meshes and multiple materials as a starting point. A handful of components for the blueprint (or even widget?). Even if your platform is mobile, you will still have a shader complexity low enough for all mobiles as long as your material don’t get too complex.

You could have various blueprint components or subclasses. It will become useful when your asset collection gets large. That is how I would go about it…

Hi!
Im developing a small TCG game and I was thinking of making the card face in two ways. I need your help to decide wich way would be better and why.

The first solution is to make a single material for a whole card face with multiple textures in it(1 for border, 1 for card image acting as public parameter to set it in material instance later, 1 for background, 1 for card description area, etc). I have even implemented partially this solution(with 2 textures at meantime just to show you what I mean):

Result:

Material:

The second way is to use 2 materials for card face and moove stuff such as hp icons, etc to another meshes attached to card mesh.

As I think with the first method I might have problems with performance(or not?) and I wont be able to animate card images for different cards using shaders wothout creating a separate material for each animated card. But I will be able to implement some col effects like card firing down when destroyed, etc really fast and easy.
On the other side method2 will not require any complex material, but will have 2 material instances + a bunch of meshes for each card and it will be much more work when it will come to some animations like the one described above.

Please, help me to decide wich method would fit best for a tcg game. I would be very grateful for a detailed answer describing why one of the methods is better than another and what problems else I can get while implementing them(I mean not problems in coding, or dev time but performance issues, platforms support issues etc). Thank you for your time and I’m sorry for my English - its not my native language!

Hi! First of all thank you for your reply! Yes, I understand this approach is really much easier to implement and I’ll have a blueprint for a card anyway, but wont then implementing effects such as Paper Burn Effect - FumeFX - YouTube become more difficult if not fast impossible?