SPA Material Baker is your one-click solution: bake any material onto mesh UVs, flatten complex shaders into lightweight textures, all directly inside Unreal Editor.
Have you tried…
Baking Any complex material (standard,layered ,... ) into something simple and game-ready?
Struggling with increased draw calls when shipping your project?
Baking materials onto UVs, only to fight with clumsy workflows or missing features?
Fantastic tool, i hope more people will realize what a big time saver this can be.
We are using a pretty complex “one for all” Shader which calculates Z-Coords/Lerps Heights, uses Triplanar, UV Noise or Dither Noise Mask to break tiling, Wetness Mask, Dirt Mask, RVT and so on.
This tool simply “grabs’ the output of your Shader and Bakes it into Textures with exact UVs as it original was.
This makes it possible to disable many features with a certain cost as it’s already baked in the Textures now, the only thing we still use is Distance Blending or such (simply things that can’t be “baked”).
The Plugin did not break our workflow in any way as we still use certain things to finetune in our Shader, but now with the baked Textures instead
With this we need less UV rework outside the Engine for our Meshes.
Just keep an eye on Texture size and don’t save your level when this Plugins Window is opened, UE might crash when saving a level (typical UE issue, as the Plugin works perfectly)
Thanks a lot for the awesome feedback! Really glad to hear it fits nicely into your workflow — sounds like you’re using it exactly as intended with those complex “one-for-all” shaders. Great notes about texture size and the level-saving issue too, that’s super helpful for others.
And yes — it fully supports dynamic or world-space effects such as world position offset and Triplanar mapping. Appreciate you sharing your experience and the thumbs up!
Also, keep an eye out for Version 2 — it’ll include faster baking performance, batch mesh processing, and improved mask handling, Terrain and skeletal mesh support and Decal material for even more flexibility. Appreciate your kind words and support!
A lotta people are saying they don’t trust the UV method ’cause it might mess with the quality.
well,Good UV layout can solve that problem. Always make sure your UVs have consistent texel density, and use overlapping for repetitive areas. Many users tend to skip this important step. Also, for large structures, use modularity to optimize texture usage and maintain quality.
Unfortunately, many big studios ignore texel density to speed up production and reduce costs. That’s why some recent games, like Silent Hill and others, suffer from optimization issues. These studios often overlook proper UV work and rely heavily on overlapping and multiple materials on a single model.
This approach may maintain visual quality, but it prevents proper baking and forces raw, heavy materials to be loaded directly into the GPU, which impacts performance. Of course, there are multiple techniques available, and the best approach always depends on the target platform — whether the game is developed for consoles, PC, or mobile devices.
The UV method is working fine, people need to keep an eye on sizes, decent layout & resolution.
A Mesh size plays a role too, it’s obvious you can’t expect creating a 2K or 4K Texture set to cover a big Mesh with loads of details from your Shader, it will loose detail that’s logical.
I’m using this to make small & modular stuff to use with PCG or to bake moss, snow etc. on current small to medium Meshes, it’s trial & error with testing & verifying but it works nicely.
This is a great tool once you get the grasp of it, creating modular pieces to use on or even as Landscape is possible with this.
Hey there. The tool seems to be outputting textures at an extremely low resolution compared to the native material bake in UE5.6. I’ve watched all your videos and read all the documentation, so I have played with sharpness, resolution outputs and just about everything else in the options of the plugin.
Unfortunately the maps come out unusable as they are extremely blurry and pixelated. Your videos don’t show this issue so I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong here.
Thanks for reaching out, and sorry you’re running into that issue — the plugin definitely shouldn’t be producing blurry or pixelated maps, so let’s figure out what’s going on.
It looks like the issue may be coming from the UV layout.
Could you send me:
A screenshot of your model’s UVs.
A screenshot of your current SPA Materials Baker settings.
check you texture settings , is not VT or check no mipmaps on you texture.
If you’re not restricted from sharing the asset with actual material, you can also email it to me so I can inspect it directly and find out exactly what’s causing the problem.
Thanks for getting back to me. Unfortunately this is an asset from FAB Marketplace so I cant really send it over. The materials are pretty dense so I cant fully see what’s going on which is why we want to bake these down and simplify using your tool.
Attached is a screen shot of both the UV layout and the SPA MB settings used. I can also conform that the materials ARE using VT ( Virtual textures) and non-VT as well.
Your UV layout looks like it will cause problems when baking materials. Right now the UV islands are unevenly scaled, irregularly packed. To get clean bakes, the UV map needs improvement, more consistent texel density, and reduced stretching, and there’s quite a bit of empty space between pieces. Cleaning this up will give you much better baking results.
A few things that would really help:
Keep your UVs normalized so everything fits properly within the 0–1 space.
Use consistent texel density so details don’t look sharper on one part and blurry on another.
Reduce empty space between islands to make the most of your texture resolution.
Avoid distortion by relaxing or unfolding areas that look stretched.
I’ve prepared a sample to give you a clearer understanding.
As you see here, the original material is a triplanar projection, the left side is more like your asset and the right one is improved Uv version. zoom closely to see what happened.
i recommend to re packed your uv model to get better result, if you want to keep the original UV just Move it to another uv_Coordinate
Hopefully this solves your problem. And if you run into anything else, feel free to ask.
Hey everyone,Fab just added text reviews and ratings!, a quick review would mean a lot. It helps me out and helps others too.”
By the way, Version 2 of the tool is currently in development and will be available soon. It will include several improvements and new features.
We’re also putting more tutorials and big project showcase to really show how this tool helps you clean up your scene and get better FPS.
