(12-11-2011 11:59 PM)Tottel Wrote: I think Esenthel does this deliberately
No matter how complicated the mesh, you simply shouldn't have 20 (or anything near it) materials on a single object.
Why? I have lots of models in range of 50-400k polygons (complex castles, ships, etc....usually separated into 10-40 parts), it is really no problem to have such models in scene and for me it does not make sense to have it separated into 20 files. For example my typical city+surroudings has 2-3M poly and several thousand objects (I am not counting grass, it goes to millions, trees are going to tens of thousands). It is no problem to have 100+ fps on such scene with typical engine (and common optimizations). We are now trying, if EE is able too (we just bough esenthel licence to check its possibilities, if it makes sense for us to migrate our project there).
http://forum.mymmo.cz/demo/for3.jpg
http://forum.mymmo.cz/demo/alca3.jpg
http://forum.mymmo.cz/demo/demoa.jpg
http://forum.mymmo.cz/demo/daug.jpg
And it should be faster to have one mesh with unique 20 materials, than 20 meshes with 20 unique materials.
Making atlas with 4096 limit from 20 textures 2048*2048 does not make any sense, but this can be solved by VT system. And such system can probably be attached to EE, we are investigating this option too.
So conclusion is, that there is nothing like "too much materials", there are situations, when it makes lots of sense. Btw, I ve just tried one very complex model with cca 20 2048-4096 textures and EE handled it without any problem, perfomance impact on scene was 1,5 FPS in 2560*1600. So what? We are in 2011, most of us is trying to achieve next gen quality, so being scared from polygons and materials like 7 years ago makes really no sense.