Render Material To Image

If you press the Render Material To Image the current Texture + Material of the current Gameobject will get rendered into a texture that you’ll then be able to save wherever you want:

In the asset window you can change the default save route and the Rendered Image Texture Scale. Since the output will look slightly less sharp than the in-engine version you can upscale the output to make it more crisp in case you need to.

This feature is useful to offload some work from the gpu. By baking the result into a texture it means that the gpu won’t need to compute all effects every single frame. In any case please keep in mind that the asset is made with efficiency in mind, even in low end devices. This is just one more tool at your disposal. Please don’t try to optimize early by swapping out all Materials by a rendered image. Only use this for performance reasons after running into performance problems (you most likely never will, even in low end devices).

Where this feature really shines is when doing complex setups where you pre-render a certain image for some VFX or to pre-render a texture that you can then modify with the asset shader. This feature allows you to stack and re-apply the asset effects recursively as many times as you need.