Materials and shader properties

How it works and why

A shader defines how a surface is drawn. A material chooses a shader and stores its property values: textures, base color, metallic, smoothness, transparency and similar controls. A MeshRenderer references one or more materials. Changing the shader can change which properties a material exposes.

For URP use a URP-compatible shader such as Universal Render Pipeline/Lit. Built-In pipeline shader examples are not necessarily drop-in compatible with URP or HDRP. Texture and material assets are separate; one texture can be reused by several materials.

Example you can try

using UnityEngine;

public sealed class TintRenderer : MonoBehaviour
{
    [SerializeField] private Renderer target;
    private static readonly int BaseColor = Shader.PropertyToID("_BaseColor");
    private MaterialPropertyBlock block;

    public void SetColor(Color color)
    {
        if (target == null) return;
        block ??= new MaterialPropertyBlock();
        target.GetPropertyBlock(block);
        block.SetColor(BaseColor, color);
        target.SetPropertyBlock(block);
    }
}

When to use it and what can go wrong

Why a property block? It changes per-renderer shader properties without creating a separate material instance, although batching behavior depends on the render pipeline (especially SRP Batcher). Pitfall: renderer.material may instantiate a copy; sharedMaterial edits affect every user of the asset in the Editor.

Try it: Make two objects share a material; change only one object’s color at runtime with a property block.

Further reading and official references