Hello. This is absolutely a noob question, but I can't seem to find a straightforward answer online!

I am playing around with 2.5D (3D world, 2D sprite objects), having previously released a commercial game using the 2D asset pipeline (e.g. SpriteRenderer).

In order to have my objects cast shadows, I cannot use a SpriteRenderer and instead I'm using a MeshRenderer. No problem. This also means I need create materials to apply to the renderer. Also not a problem.

My question is, do I need to import/create a separate sprite/texture for every image that I want to use, and then also a separate material for each? Is there a better way to do this?

I am used to working with spritesheets and slicing these into individual images, which I can then apply to the SpriteRenderer independently, but MeshRenderer requires a material and it seems like I cannot apply individual slices of a spritesheet to a material; I have to apply the whole sprite image.

I'm curious as to how others have tackled this, as creating my character and environment spritesheets as individual images is much harder than creating combined tilesets!

Also, I know that I can use the material Tiling and Offset values to apply only a slice of a texture to the material, but this seems to be universal and cannot be modified per instance for example. Am I going about this the wrong way?