Merging materials and reducing draw calls

Saw this older thread which talks about Texture Samplers and Texture arrays.

Merging materials inside Unreal to reduce draw calls. Can someone share their workflow for doing this? Is a 3rd party plugin like MeshBaker required?
I’m familiar with the process inside Unity but very much a novice in optimizing graphics in UE.

Unreal have some similar to MeshBaker outofthebox

Does UE5 have a material merging option? I need it and can’t find it.

What do you mean? If you have a mesh that uses multiple materials, then you would have to create texture maps that would apply the material effect you’re going for in one material, but that’s something you would have to do yourself since it requires UV mapping and making textures.

It does its the merge actors tool. But it’s kind of tricky to use and most of the time the merged texture maps are not very efficient.
I used Instalod for a while and it did this very well and packed the textures nicely.

1 Like

I need something like this - MeshBake in Code Plugins - UE Marketplace

It merges a lot of materials of the skeletal mesh to reduce drawcalls. Currently struggling with a skeletal mesh that has 10 materials and is producing a lot of drawcalls. I’m building a RTS and its really having an impact on performance.