I’m a relative beginner when it comes to 3D art. I have started experimenting with smart materials like the ones in the new Stack-o-Bot example. I’m baking curvature and AO information into the Nanite meshes and then using that for coloring in the material.
I really, really like the way everything looks right now but I get ugly pop-in effects on literally just one of my meshes (my only really complex mesh) when nanite changes the triangle counts. which, given my simple graphics, I’d really like to eliminate.
I think I basically want to create fixed textures or a fixed material of how the whole mesh looks with the smart material at full triangle count and just use that. But I don’t really even know where to start.
If you want to keep the effect in your meshes, without the pop-in, the best approach would be to bake the materials. In order to do so, use the “Bake Out Materials” function in the editor, with the following steps:
Open the mesh, assign the smart material
Go to Asset > Bake Out Materials
Pick your output resolution (2k should do the trick)
Select the maps you want baked (Base Color, Normal, Roughness, Metallic)
Hit “Bake”, UE will generate the textures, and the new material
Assign the baked material to the mesh
You can find more details regarding the process in the UE guide below (this one in particular deals with UDIMs, but it does cover the Bake Out process as well):