I stumbled upon a few videos about shaders and materials from The Cherno and my understanding is that materials are this sort of input that a shader takes to calculate an output instead of hard coding values into the shader so basically shaders become more flexible since you can control what their output is with a material.
I’m not sure if this is 100% accurate, but it makes sense so if this is true would you have multiple types of materials for different shaders? For example, shadows I believe require at least a shadow and depth shader so would I have a shadow material? Same for skinning/skeleton animations or are materials only for controlling how an object reacts to light?