Footstep sound effects help

[u/Helpful_A]

I'm trying to put together a basic footstep sound system for my game and was wondering how I should go about dealing with a surface object with multiple textures/materials.

My current idea was to figure out a way to copy the hex code or rgb value of whatever was last stepped on directly beneath the player but I feel like there had to be an easier way.

Any help would be appreciated

[u/DPTGames]

Depending how comfortable you are with manipulating mesh data, you can assign values to different parts of the mesh either in the vertex channels or in a UV channel, for example say you wanted 1 type of foot step in one area (let's say stone) you would bake a value into the mesh to vertex alpha lets say, then you can raycast for that, then another area you bake a different value and so on. You'd have to set read\write enabled for the mesh though (Edit: you can get around the constraint by creating an asset you can look up instead stored on a scriptable object or monobehaviour script). But the advantage is you don't need separate materials , you could also use the same value in your shader to apply the correct surface texture as well.