Hey, I’m having an issue with baking out materials for a static mesh I put together. I’m trying to reduce drawcalls by combining grouped meshes into a single static mesh, as well as baking the materials onto the static mesh into one to reduce drawcalls. The only issue I’m having is with merging the materials on things like the fireplace I reference below. It doesnt bake the textures on properly and comes out looking like it has no normals or something. Has a very smooth un-textured look to it even though I’m baking the materials on 2048x2048. Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated, this fireplace alone has over 300 material elements. I also included my settings for baking the materials to the right. Thank you!
I think you might have chosen the wrong merge option. At a rough guess, a merged model like that should, maybe, 8 material slots. Did you use ‘convert actors to static mesh’ or ‘merge actors’?
Also, for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t bother with a model like that. It’s not going to make any different to performance. And as you make larger and larger models, the lightmap has to be bigger and bigger.
Well I used ‘convert actors to static mesh’ to convert all the separate meshes into one. But after that I went into the static mesh and under window > developer tools > merge actors im trying to merge the materials, because as you can see in the pic above, it has over 300 material elements. im assuming that all of those element slots equate to one draw call on the cpu right? I’m in the process of trying to optimize my scene. Even with strict LOD’s set, when i zoom out and view my whole map i have around 9000 cpu drawcalls and it can sometimes spike to 20k. the framerate tanks down to 30-40fps. also with strict LODs when looking at the whole map zoomed out it will be rendering around 6 million triangles, but from what I read that shouldnt be too much of an issue, mainly the drawcalls are creating a bottleneck. trying to go around and reduce the number of static meshes where possible and combine their material slots so that I can run at around 60 fps at least. If you have a better method I could use to optimize my scene that would be great. thanks for your help
Yes, the better, method is select them all and right click and choose ‘merge actors’ 
Then you only get the needed amount of slots.