Baking a 3D model material into a texture

In this recipe, we will see that one of the possible ways to optimize your games is to bake your materials into textures. The main reason to want to do that is when your static meshes use many different materials on them, the more you have the more computationally expensive it will be to render them within your scene. It would be better if the mesh just had one material so there'd just be one draw call for each object. Effectively, we will be reducing all of the complex shader math being done to instead be baked into the texture.

If you are doing something using position offsets or animations, this will likely not work well. However, this could work well for props that will not change their structure.

There may be some precision things to take into consideration, as you may not have as high fidelity as the original meshes. For deploying your projects to mobile or other platforms that require you to optimize your materials as much as possible, it can...