Baking out a material
Materials are a type of asset that can be sometimes simplified without losing any quality. Think, for example, about the shader we created in the previous recipe—we made use of several nodes to make sure that it looked good both on close-ups as well as when the camera was far from the object the material was being applied to. Creating materials that way can sometimes be expensive for the GPU, especially if the object that is being rendered is very far from the screen or at a point where we can no longer make out the subtleties on its surface.Â
For those cases, Unreal offers us the possibility of baking out a material into another one, a more simplified version of our initial asset. What we'll be doing now is reducing the complexity of the original material graphs by baking out simple textures that behave just like the more complicated original material graphs we had previously set up. Let's go!
Getting ready
The scene we will be using throughout this recipe is the level...
