Is it better to bake your textures or not?

Development Programming & Scripting
, ,
1

Hello,

I am creating some assets for a trailer park in Blender and I was wondering if I should be baking my materials to the UV map to use a single texture or if I should be using individual materials. I was going to bake everything but thinking about it I could potentially reuse individual materials on many of the assets. I was thinking that way I could have higher quality assets, but I wasn’t sure what would be better for memory as that will be my biggest limitation. Some of the materials in Blender don’t work in EU5 so I’d have to figure that out as well.

2

An efficient way can be to bake masks with your UVs, then in your material, reference your reusable materials from those masks - if you’ve only got 3 or 4 materials, you can just use the RGBA channels, one per material - if you have more, you can split up the channels into multiple values with a bit of math in your shader.

This works well with both world aligned textures and using UVs.