Too many colors?
I disagree! Simple materials (without image maps) don't take up much memory…
not more than a couple dozen bytes each, I'm sure. If you want to save
rendering time, there's lots of other ways to do it than restrict the number of
materials. The number of resulting rendered colors has nothing to do with this
discussion. Those colors just get copied to the frame buffer. The problem
with sharing materials between objects means that if you change the material,
it changes everywhere. If separate objects share the same material, then
you've changed both. How many times have you had to make two materials with
different names but the same coloration?