Thanks for the reply Gabby. That seems odd. I would think the existing texture would be used until the new texture is ready, rather than falling back to a default.
My usecase is driving the shading colors/transparency from a slider. For example, similar to the sandcastle demo, I am calling updateMaterial() to change the globe’s material. However, I am calling it continuously as a slider value representing desired transparency changes. On each execution of updateMaterial(), the transparency/alpha value used in getColorRamp() is slightly different based on the slider’s new position. Since the updateMaterial() function is called fairly rapidly as the slider changes, the the material is flickering for the duration of the sliders movement.