How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Material Instances Leaking From renderer.material in Unity

Q: What causes material instances leaking from renderer.material in Unity?

Reading renderer.material creates a new material instance that you own and must destroy, and doing so repeatedly leaks materials and disables batching.

Quick answer: Use sharedMaterial when you do not need a per-object copy, create and reuse a single instance via MaterialPropertyBlock for per-object values, and destroy any instance you create.

Your build's material count climbs over time and the SRP Batcher stops working. Each renderer.material access spawns an instance you now have to clean up. Here is how to stop the leak.

How to stop it

1. Prefer MaterialPropertyBlock for per-object values

To tint or vary a property per object, use a MaterialPropertyBlock via SetPropertyBlock instead of instancing the material. This avoids creating any new material and keeps batching intact.

2. Use sharedMaterial to read

When you only need to read or change a property for all users of the material, use sharedMaterial. Accessing .material always allocates a unique instance even if you only read from it.

3. Destroy instances you own

If you genuinely need a unique instance, store it and call Destroy on it when the object is destroyed. Leaked material instances accumulate in memory and never get collected on their own.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unity error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

Reproduce it once with full context and the fix writes itself. The hunt is the expensive part.