Changing colors of a material for separate prefab instances

I have a collection of characters that are all copies of the same prefab. This prefab has a world canvas object that has several elements (such as name, health, level, etc...). Each of the elements uses a material built specifically for that element (such as health_material or name_material) that also uses the standard shader (so I can add glow and other effects). I want health to always be visible to the player, but the name and level to only be visible when the player selects one of these characters.

I just want to change the alpha value of one of these instances "name/level info" to fade it in when the character is selected, and let it fade out when the character is deselected. As it currently stands, since I am using the standard shader, the color field on the Text and RawImage component is completely ignored (is that intentional?) so my only option right now is to go into the material and change the color of the material itself using the "_Color" property. Of course, this changes the color for all other objects using that material, which is undesirable. My next thought was to create a new material for every element instance (not very efficient, but I am running out of ideas here) and use the same method of modifying the "_Color" property for that copy of the original material. Now, the copy of the material, after I assign it to the RawImage/Text material variable, is drawing black and ignoring all changes I make to it. The strangest part is that if I open up the element in the inspector, double click on the material field for the RawImage/Text component (this material is the copy of the original material) and just touch anything (like opening the color picker for the Albedo color) the material will fix itself and render correctly from then onwards. At first I thought I just needed to mark the material as dirty in my script to cause the same effect, but that is not the case.

TL;DR: How do I copy a material at runtime/change that copies color?

Am I doing something glaringly wrong here? Should I not be using the standard shader for UI elements? Is there some known bug that is getting in my way?

 

Have you looked into the difference between sharedMaterial and material?

 

Yes, I am familiar with that pattern. The Raw Image and Text components, heck even the Canvas Renderer, do not implement that pattern in the same was as any other Renderer as far as I know, I think that the material of UI objects is just always shared.

Thanks for the thought though.

 

Ah, too bad. I don't think unity has implemented a clone method for materials, so you apparently would have to write your own and then adjust the color of the copy you created.