Is it okay to use a single MeshFaceMaterial across several objects in Three.JS?

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votes

I am parsing and loading a 3d object file (similar to ColladaLoader in operation). This contains several objects, and many of the individual objects have several materials across different faces. So, I use MeshFaceMaterial. No problems so far.

However, a handful of the objects re-use materials across them. Would it be appropriate to create a single MeshFaceMaterial and use it across all objects? There are about 120 objects per file. My concern is that if I go down this route it may impair performance (e.g. excessive draw calls, or maybe allocation of memory for each material per object?) as the majority of the objects use their own unique materials. Or, is this an undue concern and the renderer is suitability mature for this not to be a problem? The online documentation only mentions shared geometry, not entire shared Three.Mesh objects.

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three.js
As long as the color attribute is the same for all of them, you should be fine. – gaitat
Your question is too general to be answered. Type renderer.info into the console and do some experiments -- or be more specific. I would avoid MeshFaceMaterial and create models that have one material each. The color property is irrelevant. Reduce draw calls if possible. – WestLangley

1 Answers

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Using renderer.info as suggested, I was able to take a look at the draw calls, and I'm happy to report they were the same regardless of if you used a single shared MeshFaceMaterial, or individual ones per object. That's not to say there may be other performance penalties, and it does seem logical in clearly separate objects to keep things separate, but for this usage case where there is some crossover, it was not a problem.