Baking a complex material into a simpler texture

Studying different material techniques throughout this book has left us with a wide variety of tools at our disposal when it comes to creating shaders. Some of those instruments are more expensive to render than others, so we also looked at several optimization techniques in the previous recipes that should help us keep performance in check. Having said so, there are times when the best optimization approach is to simply bake down all of the complex node graphs we have created into simple textures, removing all of the computationally expensive functions in favor of standard, static textures.

In this recipe, we’ll learn how to decrease the rendering cost of a model by reducing both the complexity and number of shaders applied to it, all thanks to the Merge tool panel.

Getting ready

To get ready, you will want to have a mesh that contains two or more material slots placed within a scene you would like to use. If you don...