Bake Out Materials?

Can anyone explain what the Bake Out Materials option is in the static mesh editor? What exactly does it do? I can’t seem to find any documentation and can’t seem to understand what it is doing.

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Hey!

Bake out does exactly how epic named that! :smiley:
Literally Bake out just grab the material and creating texture('s in case if you creating roughness, metallic etc. maps) from them.

This method allows you to bake out complex materials to a single texture which means your material would not affect your performance so heavy.

Where is this good?

Ton of good possible usage exist… here is two example.

Runtime or Procedural Materials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrdsXyYU7yg ← this is my own material. we using this to achieve dirty / post apocaliptyc design. Of course this master material cheap, but if 3d asset require ton of finetune and dirt layer we often bake out the material as single texture… so we can save some performance.

Other procedural materials and runtime created effects also can be baked out and help in your rendering performance.

**LOD Materials: **Since UE4 allow you to use different materials on different lod levels you can bake out simplified materials into a single texture at different lod levels… because imagine you have a complex procedural material which looks good front of the camera, but if that material is far away 3d mesh will be small… so you dont need super high quality materials :slight_smile:

Simply you bake out and replace lod level materials with a simple one…

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Ah, it all makes sense now. Thanks for the detailed response! I appreciate it.

This night I woke up and thought about possibilites to have a material with 2 different sets of roughness and normal maps, one for a “brand new” object, one for an “old and worn out” one - within a material instance, having a slider for the level designer to lerp between both sets. Not yet sure if this works. But my next question was - why putting that double textures and lerp stuff into the final shipping material?
Looks like this “bake out” option is the answer… will go ahead and test. Just wanted to let you know, you guys at Epic are awesome and it’s fun to play with UE4 :slight_smile:

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Is it possible to save settings for the Bake Materials dialogue? I have TONS of objects to bake and I want to turn on a custom Roughness value of 1.0 and a texture size of 1024. Right now I have to do that for EVERY object individually Even if I have them all selected and hit bake, the dialogue pops up for each one. Is there an .ini that could be edited?

Thanks in advance -

very good material to study — i would add hight blend with it and feed the alpha with Vertexcolors to give more options

Does anyone know how to bake out the alpha of a texture? For some reason no matter what setting I choose, it seems to lose the alpha of the original texture.

Actually, I figured out a way to do it. Create a new material using the texture you want that has an alpha channel. Plug the RGB into the base color of the material and plug the alpha into roughness and then export both the diffuse and the roughness channels. Then you can re-combine the alpha and basecolor in your image editor.

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