This Prefab Material Quality Loader will load the proper materials from the Resources folder depending on the current quality settings. This way you can use a material with one texture (e.g. Diffuse) for low quality and a material with three textures (e.g. Self-Illumin/Bumped Specular) for high quality. This will make both quality settings of your game look better, run faster and load in less time. Take a look at the quality handling of Mad Snowboarding a game using this asset.
Demo | Documentation
This asset is Unity 5 ready!
Better Visuals: define the materials for each quality level of your project individually for each prefab or scene object. This way you can improve the graphics of your low quality settings by assigning better materials to more important objects, but keep the FPS high by assigning fast materials to everything else.
FPS Optimization: increase the FPS of your low quality setting by assigning fast materials to your objects. If you have only one or even zero vertex lights allowed in you quality settings then you do not need lighting in your materials. You could use fast shaders for example Unlit/Texture in your low quality setting and use better shaders only for higher quality settings.
Loading Time Optimization: texture loading often takes a significant amount of time! However, often the shader LOD is reduced or shaders are replaced at runtime for low quality settings. BUT do not forget the textures that are linked to the materials of those shaders! For example, if the shader replacement for low quality does not use the normal texture which was assigned to the original material then the normal map texture was loaded unnecessarily! Save loading time by assigning the low quality material with less textures in the Material Quality Loader of your prefab or scene object. This will prevent unnecessary texture and shader loading!
