Performance concerns from using multiple materials

[Mike_Lee]

I want to visualize my mesh with multiple textures, so I am using multiple materials.

I first define a variable for my mesh material to be an array of THREE materials.

Then, since I am using a BufferGeometry, I am calling the addGroup method to specify which vertices get to use which material.

When I render the scene however, orbiting and panning the camera (i am using OrbitControls) seems to be very sluggish.

I switched to using a single MeshBasicMaterial on my mesh to test whether the multiple materials was the issue, and when I did everything was back to normal speed.

The model I was having issues with wasn’t even a big model. It was a utah teapot model around 400kb.

Is there a way to use multiple textures on my mesh without keeping an array of materials for each texture, or am I missing something here?

[Mugen87]

@Mike_Lee

Is there a way to use multiple textures on my mesh without keeping an array of materials for each texture, or am I missing something here?

No, when using the built-in materials, you need multiple ones if you want to use multiple diffuse textures per model. Keep in mind that using multiple materials will lead to multiple draw calls and a possible performance degradation.

Consider to merge textures so you can sample the surface color information from as few images as possible.

[Mugen87]

As an example, the following texture contains all surface color information of the following soldier model: https://threejs.org/examples/webgl_animation_skinning_blending