koobas.hobune.stream
Performance Question: Baked textures vs Procedural shaders
Performance Question: Baked textures vs Procedural shaders Hello, first time asking on here and hopefully this hasn't been asked before (sorry if it has).
So basically what I would like to know is if there is any issue (performance wise) with using shaders on most, if not all, objects in a game.
I know it's very common to bake textures into atlases for performance reasons, and I constantly read about textures being baked and UV mapped per object (If I understand it right anyway)
What I was hoping would be possible is that I would have certain texture images of materials, let's say for example I have some PNGs for a Wood material (Albedo/smoothness/AO/bump/etc..) and I create a shader that uses these textures, plus some additional properties to be tweaked. Then I thought I could simply create a "Wood" Material from this shader, and use it on all object in the scene that would be made of wood...Then duplicate that material, tweak, say, the colour a bit, and then use that on other wooden objects for some variation.
I thought this would be an effective way to put materials on things because all the wooden object would reference the same few Textures and I wouldn't have to bake them into each individual object.
Now if I was right about that, I would certainly expect to have found more mention of people using a method such as this, but I haven't..and that leads me to assume there is a flaw in this method that hasn't crossed my mind...I'm assuming maybe there would be some sort of performance issue? I certainly don't understand how having a baked texture file for each game object (or even atlases for several) is more efficient than having a couple images per material...a game might have hundreds of objects but probably not hundreds of materials, so wouldn't this use fewer actual texture files in the end?
I hope my question makes sense and I would be very grateful if someone could explain to me how/why my logic is flawed...or not.
Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance.
