SPA Material Baker V3 – Bake and Optimize Complex Materials in Unreal Engine

Community Showcase
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Hello everyone,

I’d like to showcase SPA Material Baker V3, an Unreal Engine editor tool designed to convert complex materials into optimized textures and simpler, production-ready materials.

The workflow is straightforward: select your mesh, choose the material and UV channel, select the required baking passes, and start the bake. The tool can automatically create and assign the final material based on the selected passes.

Main Features

  • PBR texture baking
  • Batch baking for multiple meshes
  • World-space material correction
  • Support for tiled and offset UV materials
  • Additional UV-channel support
  • Automatic material creation and assignment
  • Opacity Mask and RGBA baking
  • Decal baking
  • Shadow baking
  • Displacement baking
  • Mesh optimization
  • Pixel Coverage controls
  • Custom texture naming
  • Direct GLB export

SPA Material Baker can be useful for optimizing complex layered materials, converting procedural or world-space materials into standard textures, preparing assets for real-time projects, and exporting optimized assets to other 3D applications or web viewers.

SPA Material Baker V3 on Fab

Video Tutorials and Feature Demonstrations

SPA Material Baker is also currently included in the Fab Flash Sale with 30% off.

I’d be happy to hear your feedback and answer any questions about the workflow or supported features.

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Thanks for sharing this! I ended up purchasing it and I think it’s fantastic and incredible value.

I’ve been wanting to bake decals for the longest time and the skeletal mesh baking works really well! Incredible value for money. I only found it from your post here as I it’s hard to keep up with good new content in FAB.

I did experience a crashing issue:

It was a shader mismatch in SPA’s baking code under Unreal 5.8.

SPA returned a scalar 0 for World Position Offset, which expects a three-component vector. Unreal interpreted the automatic conversion as vertex-offset usage, but SPA’s shader flags said that feature was disabled. That caused a missing shadow-depth shader assertion, crashing the editor.

The fix was to return Constant3(0, 0, 0) matching Unreal’s own material baker.

A couple of usability issues:

  1. I’ve ended up using this as a level exporter and was a little confused with the UI. You need to need to have all the meshes selected in the editor. I found the mesh list didn’t work? Maybe that’s a me thing

  2. ctrl-f to open the plugin seems to swallow shortcuts for general use in Unreal so you can’t leave it open. I just removed that shortcut key

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Thank you so much for purchasing the plugin and for the detailed feedback! I’m really glad the decal and skeletal mesh baking features are useful to you.

Also, thank you for investigating the Unreal Engine 5.8 crash and sharing the exact cause. Your explanation about the World Position Offset mismatch is extremely helpful. I’ll update it to return Constant3(0, 0, 0) and include the fix in the next update.

For baking multiple meshes, you need to add all the meshes to the Batch Baking List and enable the Decal option. The Baker will then automatically bake every mesh added to the batch list. I’ll work on making this workflow clearer in the UI.

I also agree about the Ctrl+F shortcut. It conflicts with Unreal’s standard shortcuts while the plugin is open, so I’ll remove or change the default shortcut in an upcoming update.

Thanks again for your support and for taking the time to share such useful feedback!

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