Multiple materials or one material with baked textures?

Hello. I have a quick question. Is it better to use multiple materials with seamless textures, or maybe it is better to bake all textures to one image, and make one material? One material with baked texture is hard to adjust, but I think that multiple materials can be worse for performence, but it will look much better in the end because of those adjustments. My question is… How bad for performence is using multiple materials instead of one, “baked” material? I want to use like 4 - 5 materials with seamless textures instead of one, baked material.

if you target mobile platform, go for baked texture solution.
you can also make some masks to use it on one texture to adjust the emission as an example , and it still be one material.

using 4-5 material, its fine if its for highend hardware while it still working on mobile too , but why?

optimization is something you do from the beginning of the development, not at the end of the development, so you must decide your target hardware and then push forward.

Thank you for answer. I will try to bake everything I can, and the idea with masks sounds promising. My hardware target is a regular PC for now.

What process would you use for baking multiple objects, with multiple textures into one texture, one material, one object?

I use substance painter to do my textures, and it has light baking filter where u can bake all information in the basecolor texture where u can use it directly with unlit shaders, which is suppose to be the cheapest on mobile hardware